Transforming SOS Specifications to Linear Processes

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes an approach to transform a Structural Operational Semantics given as a set of deduction rules to a Linear Process Specification. The transformation is provided for deduction rules in De Simone format and extended to incorporate predicates. The Linear Process Specifications are specified in syntax of the language mCRL2, that, with help of the underlying (higher-order) re-writer/toolset, can be used for simulation, labelled transition system generation and verification of behavioural properties. We illustrate the technique by showing the effect of the transformation from the Structural Operational Semantics specification of a simple process algebra to aLinear Process Specification.

An Overview of the mCRL2 Toolset and Its Recent Advances

“…This results in an mCRL2 process that encodes the semantics of the specification, and that can be analysed with all the means provided by the mCRL2 toolset. In [44], the underlying algorithm is explained for rules in the De Simone format [16], which is one of the most elementary rule formats for SOS. Extensions to the rule format, e.g.…”

Dogfooding the Formal Semantics of mCRL2

“…This means that, natively, we can not input this mCRL2 process term and generate the corresponding state space. If we use the technique described in [32], and we first write the model in the meta notation, we can generate a part of the state space. Because the model unfolds infinitely we observe exponential (unbounded) growth in computation time (and memory usage) to calculate the transitions.…”

“…In [32] the authors propose a framework that transforms the Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) [26] of a formal specification language into a restricted mCRL2 [14] specification (i.e., Linear Process Specification (LPS) [4], [12]). The mCRL2 language is a formal specification language for modeling the behavior of distributed systems and protocols.…”

“…The initial framework presented in [32], [33] considers only the transformation of SOS deduction rules in the De Simone format as a first step. This work has been used in [35] to model the SOS of a domain specific language (DSL), by which we successfully verified the behavior of domain specific models.…”

“…The semantics of the mCRL2 language is defined formally using Structural Operational Semantics (SOS). In [32] we propose an approach that takes the SOS of a formal language, along with a concrete model, that serves as an initialization, and transforms it to a Linear Process Specification (LPS). In this paper we extend the approach and show that it can be applied to a formal language that is actually used to specify and model discussed systems.…”