Specifications and Verification Techniques for Parallel Programs Based on Message Passing Semantics

Abstract

This thesis presents formal specification and verification techniques for both serial and parallel programs written in SIMULA-like object oriented languages. These techniques are based on the notion of states of individual objects which are defined uniformly in serial and parallel computations. They can specify and verify the behavior of data and procedural objects in multi-process environments, thus overcoming some of the difficulties in dealing with parallelism which characterized previous work on formal specifications for abstract data types.