A more accurate semantics for distributed erlang

Abstract

In order to formally reason about distributed Erlang systems, it is necessary to have a formal semantics. In a previous paper we have proposed such a semantics for distributed Erlang. However, recent work with a model checker for Erlang revealed that the previous attempt was not good enough. In this paper we present a more accurate semantics for distributed Erlang. The more accurate semantics includes several modifications and additions to the semantics for distributed Erlang proposed by Claessen and Svensson in 2005, which in turn is an extension to Fredlund's formal single-node semantics for Erlang. The most distinct addition to the previous semantics is the possibility to correctly model disconnected nodes.

Verifying Erlang Telecommunication Systems with the Process Algebra μCRL

“…Work continues on the automation of the translation of additional OTP components, as does work on verifying the correctness of the translation against the Erlang semantics [10,11]. This latter aspect remains a challenging task, for the full semantics for distributed nodes in an Erlang application can have, semantically, some very subtle behaviour, as discussed in, for example, [18].…”

Towards Symbolic Execution in Erlang

“…Some of the first attempts were done by Huch [9] and, more extensively, by Fredlund [6]. More recent approaches focus on the definition of the distributed aspects of the Erlang semantics, like [4]; this semantics was later refined in [15] and [14], where some assumptions on the future of the language…”

“…Unfortunately, there is no commonly accepted semantics and, moreover, most of the above papers only cover part of the language semantics (e.g., [4,15,14] are mainly oriented towards the concurrent features of the language). Therefore, we have recently introduced a semantics for a subset of Erlang in [16].…”

Towards Erlang Verification by Term Rewriting

“…In the past, there have been several attempts to formalize the semantics of Erlang (e.g., [5,6,12,[15][16][17]21]). In the following, we present an operational semantics for Erlang programs that mainly follows the approach of [12].…”