Work In Progress: Discovering Emergent Computation Across Abstraction Boundaries

In this Work in Progress report, we describe ongoing research on our DECIMAL project, addressing the problem of modeling computational mechanisms at sufficient fidelity to reason about the execution semantics of programs across abstraction boundaries. The automata-based formalism that we have developed is specifically constructed to support reasoning about timed behavior over compositions of multiple component automata, modeling different parts of the system under study. We show how we use composition to model a wide variety of constructs, including synchronization across abstraction boundaries, communicating asynchronous processes, and specifying programs that can be generalized across different architectures and over localized variations in the program specification.