Mechanizing compositional reasoning for concurrent systems: some lessons

The paper reports on experiences of mechanizing various proposals for compositional reasoning in concurrent systems. The work uses the UNITY formalism and the Isabelle proof tool. The proposals investigated include existential/universal properties, guarantees properties and progress sets. The results also apply to related proposals such as traditional assumption-commitment guarantees and Misras closure properties. Findings that have been published in detail elsewhere are summarised and consolidated here. One conclusion is that UNITY and related formalisms leave some important issues implicit, such as their concept of the program state, which means that great care must be exercised when implementing tool support. Another conclusion is that many compositional reasoning methods can be mechanized, provided that the issues mentioned above are correctly addressed.Received November 2003Revised November 2004Accepted November 2004 by C. B. Jones