Yeast: A case study for a practical use of formal methods

Abstract

This paper discusses a formal semantics for an existent event-action system, Yeast, developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Yeast is a good case study for the use of (trueconcurrent) semantic techniques since causal dependence among events, concurrency, nondeterminism and conflicting behaviour of specifications can all be modeled in Yeast. We discuss the use of the formalization in the verification of correctness of real Yeast applications with respect to various properties.