The relatively scant use of formal techniques in software development is the result, in part, of a lack of suitable support tools. Many tools have been developed that provide novel analysis capabilities but lack basic yet commonplace facilities which are essential in production software development. More importantly, many existing tools for the development of formal specifications fail to provi...

Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge the support of UK EPSRC, which has funded the Empirical assessment of formal Methods (EMPAF) project, (GR/L87347) and a PhD studentship for this work. We would also like to thank the students who participated in the experiment. Abstract Comprehensibility is often raised as a problem with formal notations and yet practitioners using formal methods...

Web In this paper we have developed the ontology for Specification and Description Language (SDL), an object-oriented, formal language defined by ITUT as recommendation Z.100. The language is intended for the specification of realtime complex and concurrent applications that communicate using discrete signals. SDL formal model bridges the gap between ideas in our minds and the actual implementa...

Call forwarding and features related to it have remained mysterious despite the efforts of many telecommunications experts to understand them. This paper shows how an analysis of the human situations supported by telecommunications features can clarify what feature behavior is desirable, even in subtle and apparently ambiguous situations. The paper also shows how a formal specification of the r...

In this extended abstract we present a methodology that able us to validate/invalidate the System Requirements Document. The approach we suggest is not a brand new one. Nevertheless because it combines semi formal and formal notations, it allows overcoming the traditional formal specification phase, which is very often mandatory for the development of software intensive system. Our paper is org...

Morgan’s refinement calculus (MRC) is one of the well-known methods allowing the formality presented in the program specification to be continued all the way to code. On the other hand, Object-Z (OZ) is an extension of Z adding support for classes and objects. There are a number of methods for obtaining code from OZ specifications that can be categorized into refinement and animation methods. A...

Morgan’s refinement calculus (MRC) is one of the well-known methods allowing the formality presented in the program specification to be continued all the way to code. On the other hand, Object-Z (OZ) is an extension of Z adding support for classes and objects. There are a number of methods for obtaining code from OZ specifications that can be categorized into refinement and animation methods. A...

The main target of this research is to provide a formal meta model for object-oriented systems. It provides a formal definition of the object-oriented concepts along with major consistency rules for object-oriented systems. This research is a contribution to the formalization of object-oriented systems. Other existing models fail to define the notion of virtual function and virtual class. In th...

The article presents a novel approach to formal verification of logic controller specification. Model checking technique is used to verify some behavioral properties. The approach proposes to use a rule-based logical model presented at RTL-level. Proposed logical model is suitable both for formal verification (model checking in the NuSMV tool) and for logical synthesis (using hardware descripti...

This paper presents a prototype tool to animate and visualize requirements called REQVIZ. In essence, this tool takes a Z specification as input and generates a visualization as output, through which, users can validate requirements. The prototype was developed based on architectural design driven by patterns. This process brings benefits that impact directly on understanding, reuse, evolution,...