Abstract State Machines: A Method for High-Level System Design and Analysis

Written for hardware-software system engineers, researchers and students, this text introduces a systems engineering method that guides the development of software and embedded hardware-software systems seamlessly from requirements capture to their implementation. It helps the designer to cope with the three stumbling-blocks of building modern software based systems: size, complexity and trustworthiness. It covers within a single conceptual framework both design, verification by reasoning techniques, and experimental validation by simulation and testing. The text contains detailed proofs, exercises, as well as numerous real-world examples and case studies.

The systems engineering method proposed in this book, which is based on Abstract State Machines (ASMs), guides the development of software and embedded hardware-software systems seamlessly from requirements capture to actual implementation and documentation. The method bridges the gap between the human understanding and formulation of real-world problems and the deployment of their algorithmic solutions by code-executing machines. Within a single conceptual framework it covers design, verification by reasoning techniques, and validation by simulation and testing. ASMs improve current industrial practice by using accurate high-level modeling and by linking the descriptions at the successive stages of system development in an organic and efficiently maintainable chain of rigorous and coherent system models at stepwise-refined abstraction levels. In several industrial projects the ASM method has proven its superiority compared to the popular UML methodology when designing complex parallel or dynamic systems.
This book combines the features of a textbook and a handbook: the reader will find detailed explanations, proofs, and exercises as well as numerous examples and real-world case studies. Researchers will find here the most comprehensive description of ASMs available today and professionals will use it as a "modeling handbook for the working software engineer." As a textbook it supports self-study or it can form the basis of a lecture course. Even more information can be found on the related website maintained by the authors: http://www.di.unipi.it/AsmBook/