Abstract The idea of successively refining an abstract specification until it contains enough detail to suggest an implementation has been investigated by numerous researchers. The emphasis to date has been on techniques that, unfortunately, lead to a large amount of manual formal labour for each refinement step. With such techniques, both the cost and the possibility of errors arising informal manipulation are high. Using a theorem prover can reduce the number of manipulation errors, but, given current technology, the amount of labour is still daunting. This research explores an alternative solution to the refinement problem, namely the use of syntactic transformations to realize each refinement step. We reduce formal labour by employing automatic transformations that guarantee the preservation of desirable properties—e.g., deadlock-freedom. Automatic transformations are particularly appealing for the development of large, complex distributed systems, where a manual approach to refinement would be prohib...
['Paul C. Attie', 'Champak Das']
Automating the refinement of specifications for distributed systems via syntactic transformations