PROTEAN: A tool for automated protocol analysis

A program which performs an automated analysis of a protocol specification is discussed. The input is a protocol specified formally using the systems of communicating machines (SCMs) model and the output is a system and/or global reachability graph, together with any protocol errors which were discovered. The program, called PROTEAN analyzes the protocol for errors such as deadlock and nonexecutable transitions. The SCM model uses a combination of finite state machines and variables, which may be local to a single machine or shared by two or more machines. The current implementation of the model is limited to two-machine protocols. An analysis of a simple data link protocol is included to illustrate the use of the SCM automated model.<
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