Modelling concurrency with tabular expressions

Tabular expressions (Parnas et al) [3, 11, 8, 6] are a software specification technique that becomes increasingly popular in software industry. The current state of the technique is restricted to sequential systems only. In this paper we show how concurrency can be treated in some systematic way in the framework of automata and tabular expressions. Each sequential process is viewed as a Finitely Defined Automaton with Interpreted States [5], and all of the processes in the system are composed to a global finite state automata to model the concurrent system. Tabular expressions are used to specify all automata involved.