"UML-ising' Formal Techniques

This invited paper presents a number of correlated specifications of example railway system problems. They use a variety of partially or fully integrated formal specification. The paper thus represents a mere repository of what we consider interesting case studies. The existence of the Unified Modeling Language [10, 67, 36, 20] has caused, for one reason or another, the research community to try formalise one or another facet of UML. In this paper we report on another way to achieve what UML attempts to achieve: Broadness of application, convenience of notation, and multiplicity of views. Whether these different UML views are unified, integrated, correlated or merely co–located is for others to dispute. We also seek to support multiple views, but are also in no doubt that there must be sound, well defined relations between such views. We thus report on ways and means of integrating formal techniques such as RAISE (RSL) [58, 59], Petri Nets [56, 62, 37, 61, 41], Message and Live Sequence Charts [42–44, 64, 13], Statecharts [23, 24, 26, 27], RAISE with Timing (TRSL) [18, 45, 46], and TRSL with Duration Calculus [79, 30]. In this way one achieves a firm foundation for combined uses of these formal development techniques, one that can be believably deployed for as wide a spectrum, or even a wider spectrum of software (and hardware) development, as, respectively than UML.