An extended algebra for the validation of communication protocols

This paper presents a simple algebra for the validation of communication protocols modelled as state-transition systems. It is based on an original extension to the Protocol validation algebra by Holzmann (1982), enhanced with additional facilities such as operators for handling parallelism among communicating processes and rules for obtaining the specification of a composed process from those of the components. The semantics of the algebraic operators provide for a validation technique, through which some protocol properties can be verified, such as termination, deadlock freeness, livelock freeness, absence of residuals and conformity of the protocol to the service. A brief description of a software tool which implements the method is given