Tutorials

This section provides tutorials on how to use the AS2FM tools to convert an autonomous robotic system into a formal model compatible with existing model checker tools (i.e., in the JANI format).

The page is subdivided in two main sections, one providing a tutorial for converting an SCXML model into JANI, and the other one providing a tutorial for converting a CONVINCE robotic JANI model into (plain) JANI.

The resulting JANI model from one of the approaches above can then be given to any model checker accepting JANI as an input format and being able to handle DTMC models. This could for example be the Storm SMC extension SMC-STORM, which we developed as part of the CONVINCE toolchain. Check out the documentation of SMC-Storm for further details. It can also be checked with external tools accepting JANI as input, e.g., the other engines of the Storm model checker or the Modest Toolset.

Prerequisites

Before starting the tutorials, make sure to install AS2FM, as described in the installation guide.

How to convert from (SC)XML to plain JANI?

This tutorial explains how to convert an autonomous system specified using a combination of BT-XML and SCXML files into a JANI model. For this tutorial, we assume the system specification is already available. Further explanations on how to specify the system can be found in the SCXML How-To <scxml_howto>.

Reference Model

For this tutorial, we use the model defined here: ros_example_w_bt. The model consists of a main.xml file, referencing to the BT files running in the system and the SCXML files modeling the BT plugins, as well as the environment and the ROS nodes.

This example models a simple system with a battery that is continuously drained and, once it reaches a certain level, an alarm is triggered. A behavior tree continuously monitors the alarm topic and, once it is triggered, recharges the battery to its full level before starting the draining process again.

The image below gives an overview of an exemplary system to be model-checked.

An image of the complete exemplary system.

In this example, the system is composed by the following components modeled in SCXML:

  • a Battery Drainer, that at each time step drains the battery by 1%, and each time the charge trigger is received, it recharges the battery to 100%.

  • a Battery Manager, that at each time the battery level is received checks if it is below 30% and, if so, triggers the alarm.

The Behavior Tree continuously checks the alarm topic and, once it is triggered, sends a charge trigger to the battery drainer.

The JANI property battery_charged given in battery_properties.jani defines the property of interest to be model-checked. In this case, it calculates the minimal probability that the battery level will eventually be 100%, after an initial depletion time, i.e., all we verify here is that the battery is charged at some point.

In the main.xml file introduced earlier, the maximum run time of the system is specified with max_time and shared across the components. To make sure that the model-checked property makes sense, the allowed runtime needs to be high enough to have enough time to deplete the battery, i.e., in this example the maximal time needs to be at least 100s because the battery is depleted by 1% per second. Further information about this and other configuration parameters can be found in the Available Parameters section of the How-To page.

In addition, in this main file, all the components of the example are put together, and the property to use is indicated.

Structure of Inputs

The as2fm_scxml_to_jani tool takes a main XML file, e.g., main.xml with the following content:

  • one or multiple ROS nodes in SCXML:

    <input type="ros-scxml" src="./battery_manager.scxml" />

  • the environment model in SCXML:

    <input type="ros-scxml" src="./battery_drainer.scxml" />

  • the behavior tree in XML,

  • the plugins of the behavior tree leaf nodes in SCXML,

  • the property to check in temporal logic, currently given in JANI, later support for XML will be added:

    <properties>
    <input type="jani" src="./battery_depleted.jani" />
</properties>

  • additionally, commonly shared variables for synchronization between the components are specified in the main file:

    <mc_parameters>
    <max_time value="100" unit="s" />
</mc_parameters>

All of those components are converted into one JANI DTMC model by the as2fm_scxml_to_jani tool.

Running the Script

After installing the AS2FM packages as described in the installation section, a full system model can be converted into a model-checkable JANI file as follows:

cd AS2FM/jani_generator/test/_test_data/ros_example_w_bt/
as2fm_scxml_to_jani main.xml

The output is a JANI file called main.jani that will be located in the same folder.

How to convert from CONVINCE robotic JANI to plain JANI?

Note

The CONVINCE robotic JANI extension is not related to the modeling of robotics system using ROS, unlike the SCXML approach. The following tutorial targets users that want to develop a JANI model of a robotics system by hand.

We provide a Python script to convert models describing the system and its environment together, given in the CONVINCE robotics JANI flavor as specified in the data model repository, into plain JANI accepted as input by model checkers.

Running the Script

After it has been installed, the script can be run on a CONVINCE robotics JANI model. It outputs a plain JANI conversion.

as2fm_convince_to_plain_jani --convince_jani path_to_convince_robotic_file.jani --output output_plain_file.jani

Example

Let’s convert a first simple robotic JANI model. An example can be found in here. The environment model describes a room with three straight edges and one edge with a small corner in the middle. The room describing the environment in which the robot operates looks like this:

An image illustrating the room's shape.

The lower left corner is at coordinates (0,0) and the upper right corner at coordinates (3,5). Lengths are given in meters, which means that the room has a dimension of 3x5m with a corner of 0.5m at the top left. The robot is placed at coordinates (0.5, 0.5) initially, and has a round shape with a radius of 0.3 m and a height of 0.2m. In the small and simple example there are no further obstacles and the robot drives with a linear and angular velocity of 0.5 m/s and 0.5 rad/s, respectively.

The behavior describing how the robot drives around in the room is modeled as a Deterministic Markov Chain (DTMC) shown in the picture below. In each step, the robot moves forward in 50% of the cases and rotates in 50% of the cases. In case it bumps into a wall, it just stops at the collision point and continues operating from there. What is omitted in the picture is the calculation of this collision point and the conversion to and from floats to integers. The latter is only necessary to make the example run in STORM because the tool currently does not support transient floats.

An image of the DTMC representing the robot's behavior.

The property given in the JANI file checks for the minimal probability that eventually within 10 000 steps the position (1.0, 1.0) is reached with an error range of 0.05m.