Structured Specification with Processes and Data — Theory, Tools and Applications

The integration of processes and data is a long standing research topic. In this thesis, we study this integration in the context of the language CSP-CASL, where CSP is used to describe processes aspects and CASL is used to describe data aspects. Our specific questions are: Is it possible to make structuring operations available for building up complex specifications in a compositional way? What is an appropriate notion of refinement in such a setting? Finally, is it possible to reason on such specifications in a modular way? Based on institution theory, we develop a framework for CSP-CASL in which all three questions have positive answers. We develop CSP-CASL as various institutions (one for each of the main CSP semantics) and a notion of refinement which we show to be healthy and useful. Furthermore, we develop several proof calculi, supporting refinement and deadlock analysis, which allow for compositional reasoning over structured CSP-CASL specifications. An example together with a prototypical implementation demonstrate the practicality of our approach. Our work has implications beyond the specific setting of CSP-CASL: The equivalences studied are independent of the specific choice of process algebra, and thus can be applied to other settings, for instance, state machine diagrams in UML.