The purpose of the CADP toolkit is to facilitate the design of reliable systems by use of formal description techniques together with software tools for simulation, rapid application development, verification, and test generation.

While keeping the same acronym, the name of the toolbox has been changed to better indicate its purpose: Construction and Analysis of Distributed Processes.

CADP offers a wide set of functionalities, ranging from step-by-step simulation to massively parallel model checking.

Depending on the formalism used to express the properties, two approaches are possible: Although these techniques are efficient and automated, their main limitation is the state explosion problem, which occurs when models are too large to fit in computer memory.

CADP provides software technologies for handling models in two complementary ways: Accurate specification of reliable, complex systems requires a language that is executable (for enumerative verification) and has formal semantics (to avoid any as language ambiguities that could lead to interpretation divergences between designers and implementors).

LOTOS was heavily revised in 2001, leading to the publication of E-LOTOS (Enhanced-Lotos, ISO/IEC standard 15437:2001), which tries to provide a greater expressiveness (for instance, by introducing quantitative time to describe systems with real-time constraints) together with a better user friendliness.

The CADP tools are well-integrated and can be accessed easily using either the EUCALYPTUS graphical interface or the SVL[10] scripting language.