A number of formal methods are available in literature for analysis and design of software as well as hardware systems. To choose a particular specification method, it depends on the character of the desired product. As the complexity of software increases, the need for reasoning about correct behaviour becomes more prominent. Formal methods are a set of techniques for analysis, verification, a...

The advantages of using a formal specification are in its precise definition of object properties and its declarative description of operations of a system. The Z notation is used widely in the literature of formal system designs and the research of language semantics. In line with the rapid growth of multimedia omputation research, we use the Z notation to describe a multimedia database that s...

At present, few guidelines exist for applying the Z notation to concurrent systems, while existing approaches to proving properties of Z speciications of concurrent systems place emphasis on the use of additional formalisms such as temporal logic. This paper proposes a practical and rigorous approach to specifying and verifying concurrent systems using the Z notation alone. Guidelines are given...

UML is a standard modelling language that is able to specify a wide range of object-oriented concepts. However, there are some aspects that UML does not fully discuss. For example, UML has no mechanism to prevent the specification, for semantic reasons, of undesirable relationships. With the fast evolution of the requirements of our nowadays applications we cannot simply rely on omitting what w...

Object oriented constraint programs (OOCPs) emerge as a leading evolution of constraint programming and artificial intelligence, first applied to a range of industrial applications called configuration problems. The rich variety of technical approaches to solving configuration problems (CLP(FD), CC(FD), DCSP, Terminological systems, constraint programs with set variables, . . . ) is a source of...

Object Relationship Notation (ORN) is a declarative scheme that permits a variety of common types of relationships to be conveniently defined to a Database Management System (DBMS), thereby allowing the DBMS to automatically enforce their semantics. Though first proposed for object DBMSs, ORN is applicable to any data model that represents binary entity-relationships or to any DBMS that impleme...