An analytical and experimental comparison of CSP extensions and tools

Abstract

Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) has been widely applied to modeling and analyzing concurrent systems. There have been considerable efforts on enhancing CSP by taking data and other system aspects into account. For instance, CSPM combines CSP with a functional programming language whereas CSP# integrates high-level CSP-like process operators with low-level procedure code. Little work has been done to systematically compare these CSP extensions, which may have subtle and substantial differences. In this paper, we compare CSPM and CSP# not only on their syntax, but also operational semantics as well as their supporting tools such as FDR, ProB, and PAT. We conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of these tools in different settings. Our comparison can be used to guide users to choose the appropriate CSP extension and verification tool based on the system characteristics.