A Survey Of Verification Techniques For Parallel Programs

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Abstract State Machines, B and Z, which took place in Orford, QC, Canada, in February 2010. The 26 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The book also contains two invited talks and abstracts of 18 short papers which address work in progress, industrial experience reports and tool descriptions. The papers cover recent advances in four equally rigorous methods for software and hardware development: abstract state machines (ASM), Alloy, B and Z. They share a common conceptual framework, centered around the notions of state and operation, and promote mathematical precision in the modeling, verification and construction of highly dependable systems.

This book is about the verification of reactive systems. A reactive system is a system that maintains an ongoing interaction with its environment, as opposed to computing some final value on termination. The family of reactive systems includes many classes of programs whose correct and reliable construction is con sidered to be particularly challenging, including concurrent programs, embedded and process control programs, and operating systems. Typical examples of such systems are an air traffic control system, programs controlling mechanical devices such as a train, or perpetually ongoing processes such as a nuclear reactor. With the expanding use of computers in safety-critical areas, where failure is potentially disastrous, correctness is crucial. This has led to the introduction of formal verification techniques, which give both users and designers of software and hardware systems greater confidence that the systems they build meet the desired specifications. Framework The approach promoted in this book is based on the use of temporal logic for specifying properties of reactive systems, and develops an extensive verification methodology for proving that a system meets its temporal specification. Reactive programs must be specified in terms of their ongoing behavior, and temporal logic provides an expressive and natural language for specifying this behavior. Our framework for specifying and verifying temporal properties of reactive systems is based on the following four components: 1. A computational model to describe the behavior of reactive systems. The model adopted in this book is that of a Fair Transition System (FTS).

This book originates from the International Symposium on Compositionality, COMPOS'97, held in Bad Malente, Germany in September 1997. The 25 chapters presented in revised full version reflect the current state of the art in the area of compositional reasoning about concurrency. The book is a valuable reference for researchers and professionals interested in formal systems design and analysis; it also is well suited for self study and use in advanced courses.