Progress-preserving Refinements of CTA

We develop a theory of refinement for timed asynchronous systems, in the setting of Communicating Timed Automata (CTA). Our refinement applies point-wise to the components of a system of CTA, and only affecting their time constraints—in this way, we achieve compositionality and decidability. We then establish a decidable condition under which our refinement preserves behavioural properties of systems,such as their global and local progress. Our theory provides guidelines on how to implement timed protocols using the real-time primitives of programming languages. We validate our theory through a series of experiments, supported by an open-source tool which implements our verification techniques.