about alloy
Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them. It has been used in a wide range of applications from finding holes in security mechanisms to designing telephone switching networks.
An Alloy model is a collection of constraints that describes (implicitly) a set of structures, for example: all the possible security configurations of a web application, or all the possible topologies of a switching network. Alloy’s tool, the Alloy Analyzer, is a solver that takes the constraints of a model and finds structures that satisfy them. It can be used both to explore the model by generating sample structures, and to check properties of the model by generating counterexamples. Structures are displayed graphically, and their appearance can be customized for the domain at hand.
At its core, the Alloy language is a simple but expressive logic based on the notion of relations, and was inspired by the Z specification language and Tarski’s relational calculus. Alloy’s syntax is designed to make it easy to build models incrementally, and was influenced by modeling languages (such as the object models of OMT and UML). Novel features of Alloy include a rich subtype facility for factoring out common features and a uniform and powerful syntax for navigation expressions.
The Alloy Analyzer works by reduction to SAT. Version 4 was a complete rewrite that included Kodkod, a new model finding engine that optimizes the reduction, and a new front end.
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Technical questions about Alloy: Stack Overflow
Other questions or comments: alloy@mit.edu