Specification and analysis of synchronous reactions

Abstract.

Development environments based on the synchronous paradigm do not offer many validation tools dedicated to numerical aspects, while various techniques are well known. Actually it appears that in the most general case models are extended with a special value that makes explicit the absence of discrete events at a given instant, which prevents from directly taking advantage of existing methods. This paper deals with absence handling in the context of the synchronous paradigm. With this focus it first surveys the main languages and stresses the importance of clocks, then it discusses our “Clock Language” that makes possible the handling of numerical aspects without explicit absence.