A Review of Object-oriented Approaches in Formal Methods

This paper presents a survey of recent approaches in the application of the object-oriented paradigm to formal specification. The complexity of current information systems demands the use of a higher degree of formalism in the development process. Formal languages such as Z, VDM and Lotos have been used extensively in academic environments and research projects; however, their utilization in the ‘real world’ is still relatively small. The use of object-oriented concepts has now been suggested as a good solution to the lack of expressiveness that characterizes most of these languages. Several approaches addressing this issue have appeared in the literature recently, including extensions to most existing languages. In this paper we review some of these techniques and discuss problems and issues relevant to the combination of formal methods and object orientation.