Introduction to the PSTV-IX

Abstract

1. The Ninth PSTV Symposium The Ninth IFIP TC-6 International Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing and Verifica- tion was held at the University of Twente in Enschede, The Netherlands, in June 1989. Ap- proximately 170 participants attended the Sym- posium, testifying to the growth of interest in its goal, the application of formal methods to the design, description, analysis, implementation and testing of open systems. In this edition of the Symposium, the following themes are covered in particular: • formal specification of switching systems using Z, Estelle and LOTOS; • application of formal models: process algebras, transition systems, temporal logic; • conformance testing: test generation, design and implementation of test systems; • compilation and transformation of formal de- scription techniques; • tool environments; and • verification by state space exploration. A record number of 94 papers were submitted, out of which 26 were selected for presentation at the regular sessions. Three invited presentations introduced the audience to new topics: one on compositional methods in design and verification of real-time distributed systems, by W.P. de Roever and J.J.M. Hooman, one on open distributed processing, by J.J. van Griethuysen, and one on EEC research policies, by J.-J. Lauture. Both the regular papers and two of the invited papers (the technical ones) appeared in the Symposium Pro- ceedings. Besides the regular sessions and the invited presentations, the Symposium featured one day of tutorial presentations and two short workshop ses- sions. A selection of these events has given birth to the collection presented in this issue, consisting of a tutorial on formal methods in protocol con- formance testing, two papers on experience with formal methods in protocol implementation and a paper on a meta-tool assisted design of a graphical G-LOTOS editor. Before introducing the contents of this collec- tion in more detail, it seems appropriate to recall the Symposium events which gave birth to this special issue. By giving not just outlines of what the papers of this selection are about, but also a recollection of the lively arena in which they were proposed in their first form, we hope to succeed in stimulating the reader's curiosity towards what these papers tell, the answers they give to relevant questions and the questions they put forward. 2. Tutorial presentations The organization of a tutorial day was in the tradition of the Symposium since its seventh edi- tion (Ziirich, 1987). Three tutorials were given: • F.W. Vaandrager introduced ACP, the Algebra of Communicating Processes, as an algebraic framework for the specification and verification of concurrent, communicating processes. • G. Kahn and D. C16ment presented the CENTAUR meta-tool system, which takes the formal syntax and semantics of a language as input and produces a collection of language-