Real-time specification and modeling with joint actions

The notion of joint actions provides a natural execution model for a specification language, when temporal logic of actions is used for formal reasoning. The authors extend this basis with scheduling, the role of which is to enforce liveness properties and to introduce real-time properties. This is done in a way that agrees with the partial-order view of computations and can be applied already in early stages of specification and design. In scheduling principles this leads to distinction of total correctness, partial correctness and incorrectness with respect to liveness properties. A general scheduling policy is formulated that covers any reasonable scheduling as a special case. When this policy is totally correct and gives the required real-time properties, no special limitations are imposed on implementation. A refinement method is described by which a system can be transformed into a form for which this is true