Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2019
Rewriting logic is naturally concurrent: several subterms of the state term can be rewritten simultaneously. But state terms are global, which makes compositionality difficult to achieve. Compositionality here means being able to decompose a complex system into its functional components and code each as an isolated and encapsulated system. Our goal is to help bringing compositionality to system specification in rewriting logic. The base of our proposal is the operation that we call synchronous composition. We discuss the motivations and implications of our proposal, formalize it for rewriting logic and also for transition structures, to be used as semantics, and show the power of our approach with some examples.
This work is partially supported by MINECO Spanish project TRACES (TIN2015-67522-C3-3-R), and Comunidad de Madrid programs N-GREENS Software (S2013/ICE-2731) and BLOQUES (S2018/TCS-4339). This paper owes a good share of whatever value it may have to the very careful and useful remarks and suggestions from its anonymous referees.