Incremental Construction of Large Specifications: Case Study and Techniques

The RODIN project is an EU-funded project concerned with the provision of methods and tools for rigorous development of complex software-based systems. Ultimately, through the development of open-source tools and techniques, the project aims to make formal methods more appealing and accessible to industry. The project is driven by a number of case studies, each of which is designed to exercise the technology being developed and create methodologies for the future. In this paper we focus on the methodologies being developed in one of the case studies (the CDIS subset). This case study is based on a commercial air traffic information system that was developed using formal methods 14 years ago, and it is still in operation today. The key goals of our approach are to improve the comprehensibility of large specifications and to achieve a complete mechanical proof of consistency.