Specification and Compositional Verification of Real-Time Systems

1. Front Matter

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-10

3. Compositionality

   Pages 11-54

4. Compositionality and real-time

   Pages 55-102

5. Adding program variables

   Pages 103-128

6. Shared processors

   Pages 129-160

7. Concluding remarks

   Pages 161-166

8. Back Matter

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The research described in this monograph concerns the formal specification and compositional verification of real-time systems. A real-time programminglanguage is considered in which concurrent processes communicate by synchronous message passing along unidirectional channels. To specifiy functional and timing properties of programs, two formalisms are investigated: one using a real-time version of temporal logic, called Metric Temporal Logic, and another which is basedon extended Hoare triples. Metric Temporal Logic provides a concise notationto express timing properties and to axiomatize the programming language, whereas Hoare-style formulae are especially convenient for the verification of sequential constructs. For both approaches a compositional proof system has been formulated to verify that a program satisfies a specification. To deduce timing properties of programs, first maximal parallelism is assumed, modeling the situation in which each process has itsown processor. Next, this model is generalized to multiprogramming where several processes may share a processor and scheduling is based on priorities. The proof systems are shown to be sound and relatively complete with respect to a denotational semantics of the programming language. The theory is illustrated by an example of a watchdog timer.

• formal specification
• logic
• modeling
• programming
• programming language
• real-time
• semantics
• system
• verification

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