Documenting and verifying systems assembled from components

This paper presents an approach to the problem of documenting the design of a network of components and verifying that its structure is complete and consistent, (i.e., that the components, functioning together, will satisfy the requirements of the complete product), before the components are implemented. Our approach differs from others in that both hardware and software components are viewed as hardware-like devices in which an output value can change instantaneously when input values change and all components operate synchronously rather than in sequence.We define what we mean by completeness and consistency and illustrate how the documents can be used to verify a design before it is implemented.