Formal Specification and Verification of Multimedia Systems in Open Distributed Processing

The field of distributed systems is now entering a stage of maturity with work focusing on standards for Open Distributed Processing (ODP). However, it is still important that standardization remains responsive to new technological demands such as the emergence of distributed multimedia computing. This paper focuses on the likely impact of multimedia computing on formal description within ODP. In particular, a framework is proposed for the formal specification and verification of quality of service and more general real-time concerns in distributed multimedia systems. This framework exhibits a separation of concerns between the specification of behaviour and requirements and also between the specification of abstract behaviour and real-time concerns. The usefulness of this framework is demonstrated by the development of an approach based on LOTOS together with a real-time temporal logic, QTL.