Institutions for Behaviour Specification

Capitalising on the profusion of modal logics that have been proposed for reactive system specification since [Pnueli 77], on current work that explores categorical formalisations of models of concurrency such as [Sassone et al 93], and on our own past work relating specification logics and such process models [Fiadeiro and Costa 93, Fiadeiro et al 93, Sernadas et al 94], we develop a notion of institution of behaviour in which structural properties of logics and models that are relevant for specifying system behaviour can be formalised and discussed. In this framework, we characterise and relate the existence of adjoint situations between theories and models with the existence of terminal models and the difference between underspecification and nondeterminism.