Elan: The Event Logic Assistant

Distributed systems have become too complex to develop and maintain without the aid of mathematical techniques supported by automated tools.  Abstraction has been the most reliable means for gaining intellectual control of such complexities.  Over the past several years, ATC-NY and Cornell University have developed the event logic formalism to support specification and reasoning about distributed systems at a high level of abstraction and the refinement of specifications to a level of abstraction from which it is possible to generate code. The Elan (Event Logic Assistant) tool suite will provide highly automated support for both reasoning and code generation.  In Phase II we will prototype the first two Elan products: E#, an extensible notation for programming in event logic, and an E# compiler that generates code for F#, a functional programming language developed and supported by Microsoft Research.  The Phase II effort will also integrate E# with the Nuprl logical programming environment, laying the foundation for future research that extends Elan to an environment for developing critical code formally verified to meet its high-level specifications. Phase II builds on Phase I research that introduced new methods for developing distributed algorithms with event logic and new proof tactics in Nuprl. BENEFIT: Distributed systems have become too complex to understand without mathematical techniques.  Elan, by providing a programmer's interface to these techniques, will significantly advance our ability to apply them to large scale real-world systems.