The concurrency factory: A development environment for concurrent systems

Abstract

The Concurrency Factory supports the specification, simulation, verification, and implementation of real-time concurrent systems such as communication protocols and process control systems. While the system uses process algebra as its underlying design formalism, the primary focus of the project is practical utility: the tools should be usable by engineers who are not familiar with formal models of concurrency, and it should be capable of handling large-scale systems such as those found in the telecommunications industry. This paper serves as a status report for the Factory project and briefly describes a case-study involving the GNU UUCP i-protocol.