Integrated environments for formally well-founded design and simulation of concurrent systems

An ongoing project concerned with the development of environments that support the specification and design of concurrent systems is reported. The project has two key aspects: an existing and working system, Clara, that supports Milner´s CCS as a specification and design language; and the development of general techniques for computer-aided generation of Clara-like environments for other concurrent languages. The Clara environment is emphasized. It has two main components: support for the usage of formal techniques in the design process, and a rich and highly interactive simulation facility. A further distinguishing feature is the environment´s graphical user interface which is based on a pictorial version of CCS. The semantics of CCS is defined nonprocedurally in two phases: an operational semantics given as a set of inference rules, and an algebraic semantics represented by a set of equational rules