Some Experiments using term rewriting techniques for concurrency

Abstract

Introduction The purpose of this short paper is to report on preliminary investigations into the use of term rewriting theorem proving to support verification of formal description techniques for concurrent systems. These experiments are designed to explore contrasting areas in the use of term rewriting for concurrency. In two distinct sets of experiments, we use the LP theorem prover[1] for equational and inductive proofs in CSP[2], and the RRL system[3], particularly Knuth-Bendix completion and equational proofs, to investigate one of the LOTOS[4] behavioural equivalences. This work was completed as part of the SERC/IED ERIL project, which is investigating the use of Equational Reasoning for LOTOS. A complete presentation may be found in [5]. The examples presented are all small ones, but are already at the level where hand verification is tedious and error prone. They execute immediately in LP and RRL, and give hope that the same techniques can be used on much larger examp