Design with Asynchronously Communicating Components

Software oriented methods allow a higher level of abstraction than the often quite low-level hardware design methods used today. We propose a component-based method to organise a large system derivation within the B Method via its facilities as provided by the tools. The designer proceeds from an abstract high-level specification of the intended behaviour of the target system via correctness-preserving transformation steps towards an implementable architecture of library components which communicate asynchronously. At each step a pre-defined component is extracted and the correctness of the step is proved using the tool support of the B Method. We use Action Systems as our formal approach to system design.