Enhancing the Tractability of Rely/Guarantee Specifications in the Development of Interfering Operations

Abstract

UK EPSRC. We thank Ketil St len for his helpful comments on a preliminary draft of this report. We also thank Juan Bicarregui, Yih-Kuen Tsay, and especially Tim Clement for their careful reading of later versions. AbstractVarious forms of assumption/commitment speci cations have been used to specify and reason about the interference that comes from concurrent execution; in particular, consistent and complete proof rules relating to shared state operation speci cations {with rely and guarantee conditions{ have been published elsewhere. This report investigates methodological issues in the formulation of such speci cations, and their way to record design decisions. This work aims at making the use of rely/guarantee conditions more tractable, both at the speci cation level and in the development towards code.