A front-end generator for verification tools

Abstract

This paper describes the Process Algebra Compiler (PAC), a front-end generator for process-algebragbased verification tools. Given descriptions of a process algebra's concrete and abstract syntax and semantics as structural operational rules, the PAC produces syntactic routines and functions for computing the semantics of programs in the algebra. Using this tool greatly simplifies the task of adapting verification tools to the analysis of systems described in different languages; it may therefore be used to achieve source-level compatibility between different verification tools. Although the initial verification tools targeted by the PAC are MAUTO and the Concurrency Workbench, the structure of the PAC caters for the support of other tools as well.