Interpreting Syntropy in Larch

This paper presents a formal axiomatic semantics for the essential model notations of Syntropy, where an essential model provides a step towards the speci cation of an object-oriented system. Syntropy like other objectoriented development methods uses intuitive and easy to understand graphical notations for expressing the static and dynamic aspects of the model. However, Syntropy di ers from other methods by the use of mathematical notations to annotate the graphical notations and by the use of event broadcasting to abstract from message passing between objects. The lack of complete formality in Syntropy prevents the evaluation of completeness and consistency of its models. The semantics is expressed in the speci cation language the Larch Shared Language. The formalisation of the essential model contributes to a mathematical basis for reasoning using the tools provided by Larch, and is a valuable aid for developing support tools for the method. The formalisation can be extended quite easily to provide a semantics for the modelling language UML.