Reactive Modules

  • Authors:

  • Rajeev Alur;Thomas A. Henzinger

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Pennsylvania and Bell Laboratories, Department of Computer and Information Science, Philadelphia, PA 19104. alur@cis.upenn.edu;University of California at Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Berkeley, CA 94720-1770. tah@eecs.berkeley.edu

  • Venue:
  • Formal Methods in System Design - Special issue on The First Federated Logic Conference (FLOC'96), part II
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We present a formal model for concurrent systems. The modelrepresents synchronous and asynchronous components in a uniformframework that supports compositional (assume-guarantee) andhierarchical (stepwise-refinement) design and verification. Whilesynchronous models are based on a notion of atomic computation step,and asynchronous models remove that notion by introducing stuttering,our model is based on a flexible notion of what constitutes acomputation step: by applying an abstraction operator to a system,arbitrarily many consecutive steps can be collapsed into a singlestep. The abstraction operator, which may turn an asynchronous systeminto a synchronous one, allows us to describe systems at variouslevels of temporal detail. For describing systems at various levelsof spatial detail, we use a hiding operator that may turn asynchronous system into an asynchronous one. We illustrate the modelwith diverse examples from synchronous circuits, asynchronousshared-memory programs, and synchronous message-passingprotocols.