The name "temporal logic" may sound complex and daunting; but while they describe potentially complex scenarios, temporal logics are often based on a few simple, and fundamental, concepts - highlighted in this book. An Introduction to Practical Formal Methods Using Temporal Logic provides an introduction to formal methods based on temporal logic, for developing and testing complex computational systems. These methods are supported by many well-developed tools, techniques and results that can be applied to a wide range of systems. Fisher begins with a full introduction to the subject, covering the basics of temporal logic and using a variety of examples, exercises and pointers to more advanced work to help clarify and illustrate the topics discussed. He goes on to describe how this logic can be used to specify a variety of computational systems, looking at issues of linking specifications, concurrency, communication and composition ability. He then analyses temporal specification techniques such as deductive verification, algorithmic verification, and direct execution to develop and verify computational systems. The final chapter on case studies analyses the potential problems that can occur in a range of engineering applications in the areas of robotics, railway signalling, hardware design, ubiquitous computing, intelligent agents, and information security, and explains how temporal logic can improve their accuracy and reliability. Models temporal notions and uses them to analyze computational systems Provides a broad approach to temporal logic across many formal methods - including specification, verification and implementation Introduces and explains freely available tools based on temporal logics and shows how these can be applied Presents exercises and pointers to further study in each chapter, as well as an accompanying website providing links to additional systems based upon temporal logic as well as additional material related to the book.

Symbolic execution is an intuitive strategy to verify sequential programs, which can be automated to a large extent. We have successfully carried over this method of proof to the interactive verification of concurrent systems. The resulting strategy can be applied to the verification of complex parallel programs and arbitrary (linear) temporal formulas. Our underlying logic is defined such that operators for parallel programs and temporal logic can be arbitrarily nested. We support interleaving with explicit blocking, nondeterministic choice, and others. Most important, the semantics of all of the operators are compositional. Thus, systems can be abstracted and proofs can be decomposed. This ensures that our strategy of proof can be applied to the verification of large, concurrent systems.

Reactive systems are computing systems which are interactive, such as real-time systems, operating systems, concurrent systems, control systems, etc. They are among the most difficult computing systems to program. Temporal logic is a formal tool/language which yields excellent results in specifying reactive systems. This volume, the first of two, subtitled Specification, has a self-contained introduction to temporal logic and, more important, an introduction to the computational model for reactive programs, developed by Zohar Manna and Amir Pnueli of Stanford University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, respectively.