Stepwise Refinement of Communicating Systems (1994)
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BibTeX
@MISC{Butler94stepwiserefinement,
author = {Michael Butler},
title = {Stepwise Refinement of Communicating Systems},
year = {1994}
}
Years of Citing Articles
OpenURL
Abstract
The action system formalism [4] is a state-based approach to distributed computing. In this paper, it is shown how the action system formalism may be used to describe systems that communicate with their environment through synchronised value-passing. Definitions and rules are presented for refining and decomposing such action systems into distributed implementations in which internal communication is also based on synchronised value-passing. An important feature of the composition rule is that parallel components of a distributed system may be refined independently of the rest of the system. Specification and refinement is similar to the refinement calculus approach [2, 22, 24]. The theoretical basis for communication and distribution is Hoare's CSP [11]. Use of the refinement and decomposition rules is illustrated by the design of an unordered buffer, and then of a distributed message-passing system. 1 Introduction The action system formalism, introduced by Back & Kurki-Suonio [4], i...







