A New Approach to Specify Real-time Behavior of Distributed Systems

Specification of real-time behavior of a system requires a significantly different approach compared to specification of the system's non-real-time behavior. Also, a specification formalism should be easy to use, conceptually simple, and should lead to an intuitive understanding about the specified behavior of the system. With these objectives, the authors develop an event-based approach to specify the real-time behavior and relevant properties of distributed systems. Events are considered as the basic entities and a system is specified by constructing various relations among the events. Based on this formalism, a specification language is also presented. A specification in this language can be automatically transformed into equivalent specifications in many existing formalisms (e.g. temporal logic, first-order logic, etc.) for further analysis. Thus, an event-based specification can be used as a front-end tool for automatically generating specifications in many existing formalisms, which can save the trouble of writing complicated formulas in those formalisms