Constraint-Oriented Specification in a Constructive Formal Description Technique

Constraint-oriented specification is a style that can be used in some process algebraic formalisms to ‘implement’ the power of a logical conjunction. Although this type of conjunction is usually limited to properties of traces, and therefore to the safety aspects of a specification, it turns out to be an extremely useful tool in realistic applications, where it is used to carry out successive steps of logical refinement in specifications. In this paper we explain this specification style and give examples of its use in the specification language LOTOS. We then proceed with a proposal for a sophistication of the forms of parallel composition and abstraction (hiding) that are used to improve the large scale applicability of this style of specification. We give an example of their use, and discuss some other, related uses of the new operators.

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