A Practical Theory of Reactive Systems

This book presents a `practical theory' of reactive systems, with formal foundations in the temporal logic of actions. The theory supports the incremental development of operational, object-oriented models in steps that preserve already established properties. Models are given in an action-oriented language, and their modularity relates to aspects in aspect-oriented programming. The emphasis is on the theoretical understanding of reactive behaviors, and on using `horizontal' modularity to manage their complexity.

Special chapters are devoted to the applicability of the theory to distributed and real-time systems. Incremental specification is illustrated in the book by a number of examples of varying size and complexity.