Towards a Verification-Based Development Approach for Reactive Systems

摘要

Reactive systems work in an online manner, accepting inputs from the environment or from the user and producing outputs which are then consumed by the environment. Important examples of reactive applications include online computer games, operating systems, simulation environments, etc. Software development for reactive systems is a challenge, because the usual verification and testing techniques are hardly applicable for them. We describe a novel development approach based on using the formal mechanism of State Transition Rules (STR) for specifying a reactive system. Our main contribution is the transformation method for refining system's STR into a Lyee program specification, which allows the developer to generate a provably correct target program. We illustrate our approach using an example of the interactive Othello game.