A Formal Model of Distributed Systems For Test Generation Missions
  Nowadays, deployment of distributed systems sets high requirements for procedures and tools for the complex testing of these systems - virtualization and cloud technologies make another level of system complexity. As a possible solution, it is necessary to determine a formal list of control objectives - checklists. The automated generation of checklists involves analyzing system models (with the analysis covering paths in a model). But complex distributed systems are usually a set of coexisting topologies which interact and depend on each other and it is necessary to use several models in order to cover different aspects. This work introduces a formal four layered model for test generation missions on the basis of the component-based approach and the concept of layered networks. The interlayer mapping determines how the topological properties on different layers affect each other and, as a consequence, represents technologies (virtualization, clustering, etc.) used to build distributed systems 
Andrey A. Shchurov
cs.SE cs.DC