The formal specification notation Z [Spi92] is one of the most popular and widely used notations for the specification and development of software and hardware systems. There is a large literature base of industrial case studies that have used Z, growing availability of high quality tools for the notation, and an emerging ISO standard. In Z, one traditionally specifies a static (functional) sys...

Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become a de facto standard for design, specification and modeling of object oriented software systems. UML structures being graphical in nature lack defining semantics of the systems and are prone to causing errors. Formal methods are proved to be a powerful tool for requirement analysis, design and specification of software systems. Hence, linking UML with f...

This paper provides an introduction to the specification language Z from a logical perspective. The possibility of presenting Z in this way is a consequence of a number of joint publications on Z logic that Henson and Reeves have co-written since 1997. We provide an informal as well as formal introduction to Z logic and show how it may be used, and extended, to investigate issues such as equati...

This paper proposes a formal specification supporting tool. It is designed on the basis of the specification reusability and the convenience to construct specification repository. The tool, called ZEditor, is designed for supporting the Z specification Two remarkable features of ZEditor are as follows. Firstly, focus attention on some specification construction units so that ZEditor provides se...

The formal languages become important tools since they allow the complete understanding of the model and help in its implementation. However only a few simulation tools allow an automatic execution of a simulation model based in a formalization of the system. Specification and Description Language is a modern object oriented graphical formal language that allows the definition of distributed sy...

Static variables and methods are part of almost every modern object-oriented programming language. Static elements are for instance indispensable for certain kinds of design patterns applied during programming. Object-oriented specification formalisms on the other hand lack such concepts. This can prevent writing formal specifications close to the actual implementation, and can thus hamper a re...

Specification is difficult. It is often the case that the most difficult aspect of specifying is the structuringof the specification to begin with. Adopting an architectural approach can help to alleviate this structuringproblem. We have investigated how the formal languages LOTOS and Z can be used to develop specificationtemplates suitable for architecting specifications of distrib...