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Theoretical and Practical Approaches to the Denotational Semantics for MDESL based on UTP

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

The hardware description language Verilog has been standardized and widely used in industry. Multithreaded Discrete Event Simulation Language (MDESL) is a Verilog-like language and it contains a rich variety of interesting features such as the event-driven computation and shared-variable concurrency as well as the realtime feature. In this paper, we present the denotational semantics for MDESL based on UTP. First a discrete time semantic model is proposed to describe the observation-oriented semantics for MDESL. The observations record the change of variables of atomic actions over time. Then the healthy formulae are defined to denote all different behaviors of programs and the semantics of programs is expressed in terms of healthy formulae. In addition, we demonstrate some interesting properties about the MDESL programs expressing as algebraic laws and their proofs are supported by our formalized denotational semantics. Our theoretical approach is complemented by a practical one, we use the theorem proof assistant Coq to formalize the UTP-based semantics for MDESL. The correctness of the algebraic laws is also verified via the mechanical approach in Coq. Our work provides a novel way to verify the correctness of UTP-based semantics forMDESL both in a theoretical approach and in a practical approach. It is also a new attempt for the application of Coq in the mechanized semantics.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No.2018YFB2101300), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61872145), Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Trustworthy Software for Internet of Things (GrantNo.ZF1213) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Feng Sheng, Huibiao Zhu, Jifeng He & Zongyuan Yang

  2. London South Bank University, London, UK

    Jonathan P. Bowen

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  1. Feng Sheng
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  2. Huibiao Zhu
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  3. Jifeng He
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  4. Zongyuan Yang
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Correspondence to Huibiao Zhu.

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Jin Song Dong and Jim Woodcock

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Sheng, F., Zhu, H., He, J. et al. Theoretical and Practical Approaches to the Denotational Semantics for MDESL based on UTP. Form Asp Comp 32, 275–314 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-020-00513-4

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