Abstract

The software architecture of a distributed system can be described as a hierarchical composition of subsystems, with interacting processes as the leaves of the hierarchy. Process behaviour can be specified using finite-state machines. A global state machine describing the overall system behaviour can be constructed using compositional reachability analysis techniques. These techniques compose the global state machine of a system from its component processes in stages, based on the specified hierarchy. The key to the success of these analysis techniques is to employ a modular software architecture and hide as many internal actions as possible in each subsystem. A subsystem containing fewer observable actions can generally be represented by a simpler state machine. However, the properties that are available for reasoning (analysis) in the global state machine are constrained by the set of remaining globally observable actions. In this paper, we introduce a technique to check safety prope...

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