Specifying safety and progress properties with RSL

Abstract

Concurrent systems are intricate and difficult to reason about. Development of ‘good’ systems require tool supported notations where formal specifications can be related to executable code. This paper presents an example of how the RAISE Specification Language, RSL, can be utilised to abstract the safety properties from a sequential imperative program communicating values, so that they can be supplemented by progress requirements and environment assumptions. In this way a process algebra approach is linked to temporal reasoning within the same language. Developments and system properties are justified by means of the RAISE tools' justification editor. General schemes for specifying safety and progress properties of deterministic state transition systems are provided.

This report reflects work which is partially funded by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) under the ESPRIT II programme in the area of Information Processing Systems, project no. 5383: “Large-scale Correct Systems Using Formal Methods”.