Behavioral verification of distributed concurrent systems with BOBJ

Following a brief introduction to classical and behavioral algebraic specification, this paper discusses the verification of behavioral properties using BOBJ, especially its implementation of conditional circular coinductive rewriting with case analysis. This formal method is then applied to proving correctness of the alternating bit protocol, in one of its less trivial versions. We have tried to minimize mathematics in the exposition, in part by giving concrete illustrations using the BOBJ system.