Modeling and Analysis of Communicating Systems

Abstract

Computer systems are becoming increasingly complex parallel, distributed, and communicating devices. Unfortunately, human beings are notoriously weak in thinking of and reasoning about concurrency scenarios [5]. Therefore, mathematical modeling and analysis techniques are required to comprehend and design them. This situation is similar to classical engineering disciplines, where mathematical comprehension is already for a long time the essential tool to engineer artifacts. In "Modeling and Analysis of Communicating Systems" [8], we put forward a method for rigorous modeling and mathematical analysis of communicating and concurrent systems. The primary focus of the book is to present formalisms, methods and tools that are helpful in understanding and designing the complex concurrent systems that surround us. This book takes process algebras and in particular the notion of an atomic action as a starting point. This basic formalism has been enriched with various datatypes, including functions, sets, lists, reals, and quantifiers. In order to formulate requirements, the modal µ-calculus is used, and is extended with data and time, which as such is second to none when it comes to expressiveness. Most of the theory in the book is presented as classical theory that can be studied, understood and used by humans. But if it comes to the study and analysis of actual behavior, this is generally so complex, that manually analyzing them is not very effective. Therefore, the book is supported by an extensive and powerful toolset, available from http://www.mcrl2.org. On the toolset webpage, it can be seen that the method has been used to under

Verification of asynchronous systems with an unspecified component

“…To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have compared it to the direct approach of [34] in terms of the state space of their generated property LTSs and assumptions for Quadricopter, EFT, and our running example systems. To derive the property LTS of a given actor model and P err , common in both approaches, we have exploited the algebraic mCRL2 toolset [36], based on ACP process algebra [12]. However, we have manually added the respective A InfM to each actor model to derive the property LTS of our approach.…”

Industrial Experiences with a Formal DSL Semantics to Check the Correctness of DSL Artifacts

“…In this section we give an overview of the micro Common Representation Language 2 (mCRL2) [11]. mCRL2 is a process algebra that extends the Algebra of Communicating Processes (ACP) [5] with data and time.…”

“…In this short overview, we focus on the language constructs that we need throughout the paper. The interested reader can refer to [11] for more details. We explain the way data types are defined and used in mCRL2 (Section 2.1) and describe behavioral specifications in the language (Section 2.2).…”

On the validity of encodings of the synchronous in the asynchronous π -calculus

“…Since the late 1970s, a large number of process calculi have been proposed, such as CCS [29], CSP [8], ACP [3], SCCS [30], Meije [1], LOTOS [4], the π-calculus [32], mobile ambients [14] and mCRL2 [24]. To cater to specific applications, moreover many variants of these calculi were created, including versions incorporating notions of time, and probabilistic choice.…”