A Graphical Environment for the Specification and Verification of Reactive Systems

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an environment for the specification, analysis and verification of reactive systems. The environment allows the user to develop specification in the graphical formalism of Statecharts [1] and a built-in translator tool translates the specification into Esterel [3] program. Through such an approach, we have been able to integrate the powerful graphical formalism of Statecharts, which is very appealing to engineers, and the power of formal verification environments for Esterel. Since we translate Statecharts, which can be nondeterministic, to Esterel programs which are fully deterministic, the system overcomes the nondeterminism in the specifications by enforcing priority. The behaviour of Esterel programs generated by the translator follows the Statechart step semantics [2]. In the paper, we describe the main components of the environment, the principles underlying the translation and illustrate the use of the system for the specification and verification using an example.