Specification Diagrams for Actor Systems

Traditional approaches to specifying distributed systems include temporal logic specification (e.g. TLA), and process algebra specification (e.g. LOTOS). We propose here a new form of graphical notation for specifying open distributed object systems. The primary design goal is to make a form of notation for defining message-passing behavior that is expressive, intuitively understandable, and that has a formal underlying semantics. We describe the language and its use through presentation of a series of example specifications. We also give an operationally-based interaction path semantics for specification diagrams.

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