Logic in Computer Science (LICS 1996)

Paper: Reactive Modules (at LICS 1996)

Authors: Rajeev Alur Thomas A. Henzinger

Abstract

We present a formal model for concurrent systems. The model represents synchronous and asynchronous components in a uniform framework that supports compositional (assume-guarantee) and hierarchical (stepwise refinement) reasoning. While synchronous models are based on a notion of atomic computation step, and asynchronous models remove that notion by introducing stuttering, our model is based on a flexible notion of what constitutes a computation step: by applying an abstraction operator to a system, arbitrarily many consecutive steps can be collapsed into a single step. The abstraction operator, which may turn an asynchronous system into a synchronous one, allows us to describe systems at various levels of temporal detail. For describing systems at various levels of spatial detail, we use a hiding operator that may turn a synchronous system into an asynchronous one. We illustrate the model with diverse examples from synchronous circuits, asynchronous shared-memory programs, and synchronous message passing.

BibTeX

  @InProceedings{AlurHenzinger-ReactiveModules,
    author = 	 {Rajeev Alur and Thomas A. Henzinger},
    title = 	 {Reactive Modules},
    booktitle =  {Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual IEEE Symp. on Logic in Computer Science, {LICS} 1996},
    year =	 1996,
    editor =	 {Edmund M. Clarke},
    month =	 {July}, 
    pages =      {207-218},
    location =   {New Brunswick, NJ, USA}, 
    publisher =	 {IEEE Computer Society Press}
  }