Modular Reasoning for Actor Specification Diagrams

: Specification diagrams are a novel form of graphical notation for specifying open distributed object systems. The design goal is to define notation for specifying message-passing behavior that is expressive, intuitively understandable, and that has formal semantic underpinnings. The notation generalizes informal notations such as UML's Sequence Diagrams and broadens their applicability to later in the design cycle. In this paper we show how it is possible to reason rigorously and modularly about specification diagrams. An Actor Theory Toolkit is used to great advantage for this purpose. INTRODUCTION Specification diagrams are a novel form of graphical notation for specifying open distributed object systems. Our goal is to define notation for specifying message-passing behavior that is expressive, intuitively understandable, and that has a rigorous underlying semantics. Many specification languages that have achieved widespread usage have a graphical presentation format, primarily be..