Towards a bottom-up fixpoint semantics that models the behavior of PROMELA programs

Abstract

PROMELA (Process Meta Language) is a high-level specification language designed for modeling interactions in distributed systems. PROMELA is used as the input language for the model checker SPIN (Simple Promela INterpreter). The main characteristics of PROMELA are non-determinism, process communication through synchronous as well as asynchronous channels, and the possibility to dynamically create instances of processes. In this paper, we introduce a bottom-up, fixpoint semantics that models the behavior of PROMELA programs. This work is the first step for a more ambitious goal where analysis and verification techniques based on abstract interpretation would be defined on top of such semantics.