Abstract
Formal specifications of communicating systems should describe an abstract view of a system and hide unnecessary implementation details. A problematic implementation detail is the kind of communication used in an open or distributed system. We argue that synchronous communication is easier to use and to analyse and should be prefered over asynchronous communication at early stages of software development. Therefore we present a new class of systems that have the same semantics both with synchronous and with asynchronous communication. Such systems can be developed and verified on the basis of synchronous communication without losing an efficient asynchronous implementation. As formal framework we use CSP and develop a unified theory of asynchronous and synchronous communication in the style of [JJH90].
Our approach generalises the ‘delay insensitive circuits approach’ where integrated circuits are developed without assumptions on wire delays. Hence, it can be applied to a wide range of applications from IC design to telecommunication systems.
This research was partially supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the project UniForM under grant No. FKZ 01 IS 521 B3.
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Fischer, C., Janssen, W. (1996). Synchronous development of asynchronous systems. In: Montanari, U., Sassone, V. (eds) CONCUR '96: Concurrency Theory. CONCUR 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1119. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61604-7_87
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61604-7_87
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