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ABS: A Core Language for Abstract Behavioral Specification

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Formal Methods for Components and Objects (FMCO 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6957))

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Abstract

This paper presents ABS, an abstract behavioral specification language for designing executable models of distributed object-oriented systems. The language combines advanced concurrency and synchronization mechanisms for concurrent object groups with a functional language for modeling data. ABS uses asynchronous method calls, interfaces for encapsulation, and cooperative scheduling of method activations inside concurrent objects. This feature combination results in a concurrent object-oriented model which is inherently compositional. We discuss central design issues for ABS and formalize the type system and semantics of Core ABS, a calculus with the main features of ABS. For Core ABS, we prove a subject reduction property which shows that well-typedness is preserved during execution; in particular, “method not understood” errors do not occur at runtime for well-typed ABS models. Finally, we briefly discuss the tool support developed for ABS.

Partly funded by the EU project FP7-231620 HATS: Highly Adaptable and Trustworthy Software using Formal Models ( http://www.hats-project.eu ).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

    Einar Broch Johnsen, Rudolf Schlatte & Martin Steffen

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

    Reiner Hähnle

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Jan Schäfer

Authors
  1. Einar Broch Johnsen
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  2. Reiner Hähnle
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  3. Jan Schäfer
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  4. Rudolf Schlatte
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  5. Martin Steffen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Software Technology, Graz University of Technology, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Bernhard K. Aichernig

  2. Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, CWI, Science Park 123, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank S. de Boer

  3. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9512, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Marcello M. Bonsangue

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Johnsen, E.B., Hähnle, R., Schäfer, J., Schlatte, R., Steffen, M. (2011). ABS: A Core Language for Abstract Behavioral Specification. In: Aichernig, B.K., de Boer, F.S., Bonsangue, M.M. (eds) Formal Methods for Components and Objects. FMCO 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6957. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25271-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25271-6_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25270-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25271-6

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