Visualising Event-B Models with B-Motion Studio

The communication between a developer and a domain expert (or manager) is very important for successful deployment of formal methods. On the one hand it is crucial for the developer to get feedback from the domain expert for further development. On the other hand the domain expert needs to check whether his expectations are met. An animation tool allows to check the presence of desired functionality and to inspect the behaviour of a specification, but requires knowledge about the mathematical notation. To avoid this problem, it is useful to create domain specific visualisations. One tool which performs this task is Brama. This tool is very important for ClearSy, and is being used for several industrial projects and has helped to obtain several contracts. However, the tool cannot be applied in conjunction with ProB. Also, creating the code that defines the mapping between a state and its graphical representation is a rather time consuming task. It can take several weeks to develop a custom visualisation. In [1], we introduced a tool that like Brama allowed to create sophisticated visualisations using Macromedia Flash. The tool, however, still required the user to write some gluing code in Java to link the model and the visualisation. The visualisation built into ProB as described in [2] did not require to write code, as it uses a function written in B to link the model and its visualisation. These visualisations are rather simple and restricted. Also writing the required animation function can still be a considerable challenge. We now introduce B-Motion Studio, a tool that allows to create visualisations as easy as using animation functions in ProB while being almost as sophisticated as our previous Flash based tool (e.g., see Figure 1). B-Motion Studio comes with a graphical editor that allows to create a visualisation within the modeling environment. Also, it does not require to use a different notation for gluing the state and its visualisation. B-Motion Studio uses two important concepts: Controls and Observers. A control is a graphical representation of some aspects of the model. Typically we use labels, images or buttons to represent informations. For instance, if we model