Implementing I/O-automaton Specifications on Erlang

Abstract

An I/O-automaton is a formal system for describing and analyzing distributed algorithms, and IOA is a specification language based on I/O-automaton theory. The IOA language is not a programming language, so specifications written in IOA cannot be run. If we can run communicating I/O-automata in a distributed environment directly, then IOA can be employed as a executable specification language; this means that we can prototype various communication systems rapidly. In this paper, we describe how to implement IOA specifications in a network programming environment. Specifically, we introduce a transformation from IOA into Erlang, where Erlang is a functional programming language that has facilities for TCP/IP network communication. Also, we demonstrate how a distribued system written in IOA is translated into an executable Erlang program code.