Computer assisted manipulation of algebraic process specifications

Abstract

Specifications of system behaviour tend to become large. Analysis of such specifications requires automated tools. Most attention hitherto has been invested in fully automatic tools. We however believe that in many cases human intervention is required and we therefore propose a number of computer tools to transform process specifications. The concrete manipulation tools that we describe can eliminate constants, redundant sum variables and parameters, and allow to split variables ranging over complex datatypes. These tools can transform specifications with large finite state spaces to variants with state spaces being a fraction of their original size, and transform specifications with infinite state spaces to those with finite state spaces.