ALICE: An Advanced Logic for Interactive Component Engineering

This paper presents an overview of the verification framework ALICE in its current version 0.7. It is based on the generic theorem prover Isabelle [Pau03a]. Within ALICE a software or hardware component is specified as a state-full black-box with directed communication channels. Components send and receive asynchronous messages via these channels. The behavior of a component is generally described as a relation on the observations in form of streams of messages flowing over its input and output channels. Untimed and timed as well as state-based, recursive, relational, equational, assumption/guarantee, and functional styles of specification are supported. Hence, ALICE is well suited for the formalization and verification of distributed systems modeled with this stream-processing paradigm.