Towards Dynamically Communicating Abstract Machines in the B Method

In this paper we present an attempt to represent dynamic communication links between abstract machines in the B method. The approach complements a previously proposed extension to B, that supports dynamic creation and deletion of machine instances, providing a mechanism for dynamically connecting or disconnecting machine instances for communication. This mechanism is based on the concept of connector, in the software architectures sense.We propose an extension to B’s notation to support the definition of connectors. The extension has been defined with the intention of making it fully compatible with the standard B method, and allows one to enable communication, under certain restrictions, between abstract machines in a specification which presents dynamic creation and deletion of machine instances. We present the extension, its semantics and an example illustrating its use based on a producer-consumer specification. We also discuss possible ways of extending the proposed connector definitions to more general forms of communication.