[smj-edison]

I just realized my previous comment left out what I was trying to say—my bad! I think what I was trying to ask was: would it be possible to generate a formal specification from a graphical representation, and then use that specification to verify the source?

Also thank you for those links! I'll definitely give them a read.

[charleslmunger]

I'm far from an expert in formal verification, I probably should be doing more of it than I do. From my two links, the way I've seen formal verification work is to either translate the code line-by-line in an automated or manual way into a formal language, then check for possible orderings that violate properties you care about; or define a formal model of the state machine, and insert validation of all the transitions in the code.

If you were going to do formal verification from the graphical representation, it would be on the algorithm; namely does it always converge, does it ever deadlock, does it ever fail mutual exclusion. If the goal is for a computer to analyze it, it can be precisely as complex as the source code, so yes. But at that point it's not useful visually for a human to read.

[smj-edison]

Ah, I see: by the time you've written a formal specification, the visualization becomes redundant.