The teachers' crowd: The impact of distributed oracles on active automata learning

Falk Howar, Oliver Bauer, Maik Merten, Bernhard Steffen, Tiziana Margaria

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In this paper we address the major bottleneck of active automata learning, the typically huge number of required tests, by investigating the impact of using a distributed testing environment (a crowd of teachers) to execute test cases (membership queries) in parallel. This kind of parallelization of automata learning has the best potential when the time for test case execution is dominant, an assumption valid for most practical applications. Our investigation explicitly focuses on the impact of the structure of the system under learning (number of states, size of alphabet) and the degree of supported parallelism. It comprises three variants of active learning algorithms with different test case generation profiles. These differences can be observed directly at the level of the run-times, which all show a linear speedup for moderate degrees of parallelization, but with different saturation points beyond which further parallelization does not pay off.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLeveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification, and Validation - International Workshops, SARS 2011 and MLSC 2011, Held Under the Auspices of ISoLA 2011, Revised Selected Papers
Pages232-247
Number of pages16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
EventInternational Workshops on Software Aspects of Robotic Systems, SARS 2011 and Machine Learning for System Construction, MLSC 2011, Held Under the Auspices of the ISoLA 2011 - Vienna, Austria
Duration: 17 Oct 201118 Oct 2011

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume336 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929

Conference

ConferenceInternational Workshops on Software Aspects of Robotic Systems, SARS 2011 and Machine Learning for System Construction, MLSC 2011, Held Under the Auspices of the ISoLA 2011
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period17/10/1118/10/11

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