Verifying formal specifications of synchronous processes

Abstract

SYNVER is an automatic programming system for the synthesis of solutions to problems of synchronization among concurrent processes from specifications written in a high level assertion language (SAL). The correctness of the solutions constructed by SYNVER follows from the soundness of the synthesizer itself and from a verification phase which is applied to the specifications. This verification phase is the main topic of this paper. To provide context for the verification the paper includes a discussion of synchronization problems and a brief overview of both the SYNVER system and the SAL specification language. A formal definition of the correctness of a SAL specification is then presented along with algorithms which may be used to determine if a given specification is correct.