A Formal Foundation of the RM-ODP Conceptual Framework

This paper presents an approach for formalizing the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), an ISO and ITU standard for the modeling of distributed system. The goals of this formalization are to clarify the RM-ODP modeling framework thus making it more accessible to modelers such as system architects, designers and implementers and to open the way for the formal verification of RM-ODP models (either within an ODP viewpoint or across multiple ODP viewpoints). RM-ODP officially declared as one of its goals to create a formal representation of Part 2: Foundations. The result of our work is a complete and truly consistent formal representation, until now non-existent, of clauses 5, 6, 8 and 9 of part 2 of RM-ODP in their interrelations. Our formalization is based on set theory, Russell’s theory of types and the classical predicate logic. The formalization is expressed in the Alloy language.