On Automatic and Interactive Design of Communicating Systems

Jürgen Bohn
Stephan Rössig

In TACAS, pages 275--289

Abstract:

The design of provable correct software requires formal methods whose usage should be assisted by suitable tools. Following a transformational approach the design needs interactive user help when important design decisions have to be made. Nevertheless simple parts should be automated as far as possible. Ideally the user only guides the design process by indicating the design ideas which are then carried out automatically. Typically sequential implementations are more appropriate for automation while parallelization needs interaction to determine the intended program architecture.

This paper presents a transformational approach to the design of distributed systems where environment and concurrently running components communicate via synchronous message passing along directed channels. System specifications that combine trace-based with state-based reasoning are gradually modified by application of transfromation rules until Occam-like programs are achieved finally. We consider interactive and automatic aspects of such a design process and illustrate our approach by sketching the development of a shared register implementation.

Comments
C.v.O University Oldenburg, Germany.

Available as PostScript, DVI.

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