This paper informally presents the theoretical...

We present anoverview and synthesis of existing results about process algebras for the speci cation and analysis of timed systems. The motivation is double: present anoverview of some relevant and representative approaches and suggest a unifying framework for them. time, we propose a general model for them: transition systems whose labels are either elements ofavocabulary of actions or elements of a time domain. Many properties of this model are studied concerning their impact on description capabilities and on realisability issues. An overview of the language features of the process algebras considered is presented, by focusing on constructs used to express time constraints. The presentation is organised as an exercise of building a timed process algebra from a standard process algebra for untimed systems. The overview is completed by a discussion about description capabilities according to semantic and pragmatic criteria. 1

We propose Interaction Categories as a new paradigm for the semantics of functional and concurrent computation. Interaction categories have specifications as objects, processes as morphisms, and interaction as composition. We introduce two key examples of interaction categories for concurrent computation and indicate how a general axiomatisation can be developed. The upshot of our approach is that traditional process calculus is reconstituted in functorial form, and integrated with type theory and functional programming.

Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) provides a framework to give an operational semantics to programming and specification languages, which, because of its intuitive appeal and flexibility, has found considerable application in the theory of concurrent processes. Even though SOS is widely used in programming language semantics at large, some of its most interesting theoretical developments have taken place within concurrency theory. In particular, SOS has been successfully applied as a formal tool to establish results that hold for whole classes of process description languages. The concept of rule format has played a major role in the development of this general theory of process description languages, and several such formats have been proposed in the research literature. This chapter presents an exposition of existing rule formats, and of the rich body of results that are guaranteed to hold for any process description language whose SOS is within one of these formats. As far as possible, the theory is developed for SOS with features like predicates and negative premises.

This chapter surveys the semantic rami cations of extending traditional process algebras with notions of priority that allow for some transitions to be given precedence over others. The need for these enriched formalisms arises when one wishes to model system features such asinterrupts, prioritized choice, orreal-time behavior. Approaches to priority in process algebras can be classi ed according to whether the induced notion of pre-emption on transitions is global or local and whether priorities are static or dynamic. Early work in the area concentrated on global preemption and static priorities and led to formalisms for modeling interrupts and aspects of real-time, such as maximal progress, in centralized computing environments. More recent research has investigated localized notions of pre-emption in which the distribution of systems is taken into account, as well as dynamic priority approaches, i.e., those where priority values may change as systems evolve. The latter allows one to model behavioral phenomena such as scheduling algorithms and also enables the e cient encoding of real-time semantics. Technically, this chapter studies the di erent models of priorities by presenting extensions of Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) with static and dynamic priority as well as with notions of global and local pre-emption. In each case the operational semantics of CCS is modi ed appropriately, behavioral theories based on strong and weak bisimulation are given, and related approaches for di erent process-algebraic settings are discussed.

We extend Milner's SCCS to obtain a calculus, PCCS, for reasoning about communicating probabilistic processes. In particular, the nondeterministic process summation operator of SCCS is replaced with a probabilistic one, in which the probability of behaving like a particular summand is given explicitly. The operational semantics for PCCS is based on the notion of probabilistic derivation, and is given structurally as a set of inference rules. We then present an equational theory for PCCS based on probabilistic bisimulation, an extension of Milner's bisimulation proposed by Larsen and Skou. We provide the first axiomatization of probabilistic bisimulation, a subset of which is relatively complete for finite-state probabilistic processes. In the probabilistic case, a notion of processes with almost identical behavior (i.e., with probability 1 \Gamma ffl, for ffl sufficiently small) appears to be more useful in practice than a notion of equivalence, since the latter is often too restricti...

This paper is a survey of our specification and verification techniques, in a very general, language independent, framework. Section 1 introduces a simple model of synchronous input/output machines, which will be used throughout the paper. In section 2, we show how such a machine can be designed to check the satisfaction of a safety property, and we discuss the use of such an observer in program verification. In section 3, we use an observer to restrict the behavior of a machine. This is the basic way for representing assumptions about the environment. Applications to modular and inductive verification are considered. In modular verification, one has to find, by intuition, a property of a subprogram that is strong enough to allow the verification of the whole program without fully considering the subprogram. In section 4, we consider the automatic synthesis of such a property, and in section 5, we investigate the possibility of deducing the subprogram from such a synthesized specification.

Many process algebras are defined by structural operational semantics (SOS). Indeed, most such definitions are nicely structured and fit the GSOS format of [15]. We give a procedure for converting any GSOS language definition to a finite complete equational axiom system (possibly with one infinitary induction principle) which precisely characterizes strong bisimulation of processes.

this paper have been presented at the 4th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, University of Essex, 1992; at the Tempus Summer School for Algebraic and Categorical Methods in Computer Science, Masaryk University, Brno, 1993; and the Summer School in Logic Methods in Concurrency, Aarhus University, 1993. I would like to thank the organisers and the participants of these summer schools, and of the Banff higher order workshop. I would also like to thank Julian Bradfield for use of his Tex tree constructor for building derivation trees and Carron Kirkwood, Faron Moller, Perdita Stevens and David Walker for comments on earlier drafts.

A transformational methodology is described for simultaneously designing algorithms and developing programs. The methodology makes use of three transformational tools - dominated convergence, finite differencing, and real-time simulation of a set machine on a RAM. We illustrate the methodology to design a new O(mn + n 2 )-time algorithm for deciding when n-state, m-transition processes are ready similar, which is a substantial improvement on the \Theta(mn 6 ) algorithm presented in [6]. The methodology is also used to derive a program whose performance, we believe, is competitive with the most efficient hand-crafted implementation of our algorithm. Ready simulation is the finest fully abstract notion of process equivalence in the CCS setting. 1 Introduction Currently there is a wide gap between the goals and practices of research in the theory of algorithm design and the science of programming, which we believe is A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Conf...