From rewrite theories to temporal logic theories

Abstract The work presented here aims at bridging the gap between executable specifications and formal verification. In this paper we combine two levels of description without changing the framework. The operational level of Maude/rewriting logic and the property-oriented level of temporal logics are combined. The combination is done by an embedding. We propose a distributed temporal logic as an extension of rewriting logic. Rewriting logic is primarily a logic of change in which the deduction directly corresponds to the computation. In contrast to that, temporal logic is a logic to talk about change in a global way. Especially, more complex system properties such as safety and liveness can be regarded in a temporal logic setting. In our approach we maintain the possibility of executing Maude specifications on the rewrite machine for validation purposes, and add the possibility of formally reasoning about Maude specifications in a temporal logic setting. The work presented focuses on object-oriented Maude specifications.