The Specification and Verified Decomposition of System Requirements Using CSP

Abstract

An important principle of building trustworthy systems is to rigorously analyze the critical requirements early in the development process, even before starting system design. Existing proof methods for systems of communicating processes focus on the bottom-up composition of component-level specifications into system-level specifications. Trustworthy system development requires, instead, the top-down derivation of component requirements from the critical system requirements. This paper describes a formal method for decomposing the requirements of a system into requirements of its component processes and a minimal, possibly empty, set of synchronization requirements. The Trace Model of Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) is the basis for the formal method. We apply the method to an abstract voice transmitter and describe the role that the EHDM verification system plays in the transmitter's decomposition. In combination with other verification techniques, we expect that the method defined here will promote the development of more trustworthy systems.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA465049

Entities

People

  • Andrew P. Moore

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Alphabets
  • Birds
  • Communication Channels
  • Communication Systems
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Control Panels
  • Decomposition
  • Language
  • Notation
  • Programming Languages
  • Security
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Trees (Data Structures)
  • Verification
  • Voice Communications

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Software Engineering