Formal Composition of Distributed Scenarios

Eliciting, modeling, and analyzing the requirements are the main challenges to face up when you want to produce a formal specification for distributed systems. The distribution and the race conditions between events make it difficult to include all the possible scenario combinations and thus to get a complete specification. Most research about formal methods dealt with languages and neglected the process of how getting a formal specification. This paper describes a scenario-based process to synthesize a formal specification in the case of a distributed system. The requirements are represented by a set of use cases where each one is composed of a collection of distributed scenarios. The architectural assumptions about the communication between the objects of the distributed system imply some completions and reorganizations in the use cases. Then, the latter are composed into a global finite state machine (FSM) from which we derive a communicating FSM per object in the distributed system.