Deriving protocols for services supporting mobile users

A Prolog tool for automated derivation of protocol specifications from service specifications is described. The server for which the protocol is derived may consist of any finite number of protocol entities co-operating over reliable unbounded first-in-first-out channels. Its service is expected to consist of service primitives that read or write unstructured global virtual variables, implicitly receive or compute their current values or delete their local copies. In addition, service primitives may access distributed virtual queues, to which they append elements with desired priority or consume their head elements. Service users are allowed to dynamically select the service-access point through which they interact with the distributed server. The adopted specification language has been inspired by LOTOS. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.