Compositional specification in rewriting logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal approach to achieve compositional system specifications in rewriting logic through a new operation called synchronous composition, enabling modular and encapsulated system design.

Contribution

It formalizes the synchronous composition operation for rewriting logic and transition structures, facilitating compositionality in system specifications.

Findings

Formalization of synchronous composition for rewriting logic

Demonstration of compositionality with examples

Potential to improve modular system design

Abstract

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 paper is under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).