A Process Algebraic Approach to Decomposition of Communicating SysML Blocks

The block concept is a fundamental modelling construct in the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), a visual modelling language for systems engineering applications. In a top-down systems engineering approach, an abstract block is decomposed into concrete communicating sub-blocks. However, the classifier behaviour of the abstract block must be exhibited by the composition of the concrete sub-blocks. We show how the process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and its associated refinement checker, Failures Divergence Refinement (FDR), may be used to ensure that such decompositions are valid. We introduce a small case study in order to validate the approach.