9304295 Lukas This is a planning grant for research in concurrent software systems. It addresses the specification phase with a formal specification language family that utilizes the object as the basic model. The long-term objective of the research is to define a hierarchy of formal specification languages that address, in increasing specificity, the requirements of concurrent systems. This family of languages is based on the concept of a base language that serves as the parent class and subclasses that represent increasingly specific features of concurrent systems. The preliminary approach is to first develop a hierarchical description of the classes and their relationships and then to formally define the base class, both syntactically and semantically. Using inheritance, subclasses will then be defined for categories of programming languages that support specific language features. This approach to the specification of concurrent object-oriented systems promotes the use of abstraction and assists the specifier with the transformation of a problem to a language-specific form. The hierarchy of specifications also has potential for specification reuse. The planing activities include comprehensive study of research in areas that are fundamental to the proposed research, including formal specification languages, concurrent object oriented languages, and algebraic specifications. The planning activities also include the development of a mini-language to provide a mechanism for experimentation and for expansion of the proposed research. ***
