Michael Butler, Emil Sekerinski, Kaisa Sere: An Action System Approach
to the Steam Boiler Problem
This paper presents an approach to the specification of control programs
based on action systems and refinement. The system to be specified and
its physical environment are first modelled as one initial action
system. This allows us to abstract away from the communication
mechanism between the two entities. It also allows us to clearly state
and use the assumptions that we make about how the environment behaves.
In subsequent steps the specifications of control program and the
environment are further elaborated by refinement and are separated. We
use the refinement calculus to structure and reason about the
specification. The operators in this calculus allow us to achieve a
high degree of modularity in the development. An important aim of this
paper is to produce an action system specification of the Steam Boiler
problem.