The systematic construction of information systems

Process modelling is a vital issue for communicating with experts of the application domain. Depending on the roles and responsibilities of the application domain experts involved, process models are discussed on different levels of abstraction. These may range from detailed regulation for process execution to the interrelation of basic core processes on a strategic level. To ensure consistency and to allow for a flexible integration of process information on different levels of abstraction, we introduce a transformational calculus that allows the incremental addition to and refinement of the information in a process model, while maintaining the validity of more abstract high level processes. A complete formal treatment of model and the calculus is given and is illustrated on a small banking example.Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258

Using PVS for Interval Temporal Logic proofs, part 1: The syntactic and semantic encoding

Interval temporal logic (ITL) is a logic that is used to specify and reason about systems. The logic has a powerful proof system but rather than doing proofs by hand, which is tedious and error prone, we want a tool that can check each proof step. Instead of developing a new tool we will use the existing prototype verification system (PVS) as a basic tool. The specification language of PVS is used to encode interval temporal logic semantically and syntactically. With this we can encode the ITL proof system within PVS. Several examples of proofs in ITL that are done per hand are checked with PVS.Funded by EPSRC Research Grant GR/K2592

Refining ideal behaviours

This paper provides some mathematical properties of behaviours of systems, where the individual elements of a behaviour are modeled by ideals of a suitable partial order. It is well-known that the associated ideal completion provides a simple way of constructing algebraic cpos. An ideal can be viewed as a set of consistent finite or compact approximations of an object which itself may even be infinite. We introduce a special way of characterising behaviours through sets of relevant approximations

Designing a provably correct robot control system using a "lean" formal method

A development method for the construction of provably correct robot control systems together with its supporting tool environment are described. The method consists of four stages: 1. specification, 2. refinement, 3. simulation and 4. code. The method is centered around the notion of wide-spectrum formalism within which an abstract Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) representation is intermixed freely with the concrete Temporal Agent Model (TAM) representation of the system under consideration. The method with its associated tool support is applied to the design of a robot control system.Funded by EPSRC Research Grant GR/K25922: A compositional approach to the specification of systems using ITL and Tempura

Proving the correctness of the interlock mechanism in processor design.

In this paper, Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) us used to specify and verify the event processor EP/3, which is a multi-threaded pipeline processor capable of executing parallel programs. We first give the high level specification of the EP/3 with emphasis on the interlock mechanism. The interlock mechanism is used in processor design especially for dealing with pipeline conflict problems. We prove that the specification satisfies certain safety and liveness properties. An advantage of ITL is that it has an executable part, i.e., we can simulate a specification before proving properties about it. This will help us to get the right specification.Nick Coleman - full name J. Nick Colema

Compositional modelling: The formal perspective

We provide a formal framework within which an Information System (IS) could be modelled, analysed, and verified in a compositional manner. Our work is based on Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) and its programming language subset, Tempura. This is achieved by considering IS, of an enterprise, as a class of reactive systems in which it is continually reacting to asynchronously occurring events within a given period of time. Such a reactive nature permits an enterprise to pursue its business activities to best compete with others in the market place. The technique is illustrated by applying it to a small case study from Public Service Systems (PSS).Funding received from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Research Grant GR/M/0258

Dagstuhl News January - December 2001

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

A Complete Axiom System for Propositional Interval Temporal Logic with Infinite Time

Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) is an established temporal formalism for reasoning about time periods. For over 25 years, it has been applied in a number of ways and several ITL variants, axiom systems and tools have been investigated. We solve the longstanding open problem of finding a complete axiom system for basic quantifier-free propositional ITL (PITL) with infinite time for analysing nonterminating computational systems. Our completeness proof uses a reduction to completeness for PITL with finite time and conventional propositional linear-time temporal logic. Unlike completeness proofs of equally expressive logics with nonelementary computational complexity, our semantic approach does not use tableaux, subformula closures or explicit deductions involving encodings of omega automata and nontrivial techniques for complementing them. We believe that our result also provides evidence of the naturalness of interval-based reasoning