Proving safety and liveness of communicating processes with examples

Abstract

A method is proposed for reasoning about safety and liveness properties of message passing networks. The method is hierarchical and is based upon combining the specifications of component processes to obtain the specification of a network. The inference rules for safety properties use induction on the number of messages transmitted; liveness proofs use techniques similar to termination proofs in sequential programs. We illustrate the method with two examples: concatenations of buffers to construct larger buffers and a special case of Stenning protocol for message communication over noisy channels.

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