Formal methods are not used in their full potential for enhancing software quality in industry. We argue that seamless support in a high-level specification tool is a viable way to provide system designers with powerful and paradigm specific formal verification techniques. Event condition action (ECA) rules can be used to model and implement reactive behavior in, for example, the semantic web. Independently of target system, the behavior of rule-based systems are known to be hard to analyze. The REX tool is a rule-based front-end to the timed automata CASE-tool Uppaal. The model-checker in Uppaal is used by REX enabling seamless support for model-checking rule-based specifications in REX.
This paper presents experiences from modeling and verifying a system of industrial complexity as interacting rules using EX. We conclude that repeatedly performing normal analysis when constructing a system with interacting rules is a viable way of coping with the complexity of the model. Additionally, we present an implemented algorithm for optimizing the model to reduce the effect of state-space explosion.