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A LOTOS based tutorial on formal methods for object-oriented distributed systems

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Abstract

The majority of formal methods for distributed systems have their origins in the 1980’s and were targeted at the early generations of distributed systems. However, modern distributed systems have new features not found in the early systems, e.g. they areobject-oriented, havemobile components, aretime sensitive and are constructed according to advanced system development architectures, e.g.viewpoints models. A major topic of current research is thus, how to enhance the existing formal techniques in order to support these new features. This paper gives a tutorial level review of this research area. We particularly focus on the process algebra LOTOS and consider how the technique can be reconciled with these new features.

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Howard Bowman, Ph.D.: He is a lecturer in the Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He received his Ph.D. from Lancaster University in 1991. His research focuses on applying formal techniques to the construction of distributed systems and he is a grant holder for a number of projects in this area. He is on the editorial board of the journal New Generation Computing and on the programme committees of a number of conferences, including, FORTE/PSTV. He was the programme co-chair of FMOODS’97, the IFIP conference on Formal Methods for Open Object Based Distributed Systems.

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Bowman, H. A LOTOS based tutorial on formal methods for object-oriented distributed systems. New Gener Comput 16, 343–372 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037429

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