Towards a Formal Treatment of Implicit Invocation Using Rely/Guarantee Reasoning
Jürgen Dingel, David Garlan, Somesh Jha, David S. Notkin · Formal Aspects of Computing · 1998
Abstract. Implicit invocation [SuN92, GaN91] has become an important architectural style for large-scale system design and evolution. This paper addresses the lack of specification and verification formalisms for such systems. A formal computational model for implicit invocation is presented. We develop a verification framework for implicit invocation that is based on Jones' rely/guarantee reasoning for concurrent systems [Jon83, Stø91]. The application of the framework is illustrated with several examples. The merits and limitations of the rely/guarantee paradigm in the context of implicit invocation systems are also discussed.