Reactive Systems

　　Formal methods is the term used to describe the specificationand verification of software and software systems usingmathematical logic. Various methodologies have been developed andincorporated into software tools. An important subclass isdistributed systems. There are many books that look at particularmethodologies for such systems, e.g. CSP, process algebra. Thisbook offers a more balanced introduction for graduate students thatdescribes the various approaches, their strengths and weaknesses,and when they are best used. Milner's CCS and its operationalsemantics are introduced, together with notions of behaviouralequivalence based on bisimulation techniques and with variants ofHennessy-Milner modal logics. Later in the book, the presentedtheories are extended to take timing issues into account. The bookhas arisen from various courses taught in Iceland and Denmark andis designed to give students a broad introduction to the area, withexercises throughout.