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Formal specifications are nowadays considered as an important intermediate stage in the software development process. There are various approaches for constructing an efficient program satisfying a given formal specification. The formalization process, however, has not yet been investigated as thoroughly. Thus, it is still one of the main sources for inconsistencies between the wishes of the customer...
This paper outlines progress on: developing methods to support requirements formalisation; incremental development of formal specifications; tool support for requirements expression; modelling requirements elicitation. A central thread in this work the -concept of "ViewPoint"- is examined, motivated and systematically characterised. The implications for methods to support the construction...
We argue that the verification of parallel programs can be considerably simplified by using program transformations. We illustrate this approach by proving correctness of two parallel programs under the assumption of fairness: asynchronous fixed point computation and parallel zero search.
This paper primarily reports on semantic aspects of how a formal specification of the PCTE interfaces has been achieved in a situation where only a combination of existing formalisms could meet the needs. The motivations for combining a VDM specification language with a language of temporal logic, for translating the resulting language, called VVSL, to an extended COLD-K and for translating it also...
We draw some lessons from our attempt to introduce the formal requirements engineering language ERAE in an industrial context. We review the various experiments and comment on such issues as the typical deficiencies of current practices, misconceptions about the nature of requirements, our approach to technology transfer, the importance of methodological guidance, and the role of tools. One of the...
The first two phases, viz. requirement specification and design specification, of a design methodology for distributed systems are applied to the specification of a gas station. The methodology which is based on streams of actions is explained for this example, problems arising are discussed. Special attention is paid to the structuring of specifications.
In this paper we present a theory of correctness-preserving transformations of designs. The paper gives an informal introduction to both the structuring concept of a “design” and to certain dynamic aspects of the software development process. There is a focus on combining designs, strategies for growing designs and re-adapting them to external-context modifications. Although the notion of a design...
Pictures have been used in informal specification methods for years, clarifying textual descriptions. This paper deals with integration of pictorial representations into formal specification techniques. The usage of pictures does not necessarily imply giving up formality, and this is illustrated with the pictorial language POLAR. This pictorial language shows the modular structure of possibly complex...
In this paper we indicate how a general inheritance mechanism can be defined as a form of syntactic sugar on top of the design kernel language COLD-K. The inheritance mechanism goes beyond that of traditional object-oriented languages in that it applies to single-sorted, dynamic classes as well as to many-sorted and static classes. It will be incorporated in a user-oriented language version of COLD...
PSF/C is a formal specification language, based on COLD, a wide spectrum specification language developed at Philips Research, Eindhoven. In PSF/C, we can specify concurrent communicating processes. The process syntax and semantics is based on the algebraic concurrency language ACP.
The specification language PSFd is used to give a formal specification of a transit node, a common case study in ESPRIT project METEOR. The design of the specification derived from the informal text and the ERAE specification is included. A short discussion on the relation to the specification in ERAE is provided.
In this paper, we design a specification language in an entirely algebraic style. We describe the language in terms of abstract syntax only. We argue that this is the correct approach in language design.
Formal specification languages and methods for refining specifications into programs have, up to now, received more attention than methods for obtaining the initial formal specification. This situation is corrected in the ESPRIT project METEOR, which distinguishes the two activities of requirements engineering (RE) — obtaining the right specification — and design engineering (DE) — using that specification...
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