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Integrating Structural Design and Formal Methods in RealTime System
Design
Formal methods have been advocated as one of those
techniques that can produce highquality software and hardware systems
that has been demonstrated to come in ontime, within budget, and satisfy
procurer requirements. They are, however, perceived to be difficult to
use and unsuitable for presentation to nonspecialists. In addition, they
have been criticized for paying too little attention to the system
development process.
Traditional structured ("bubblesandarrows")
methods, however, do excel at supporting the development process, but do
not support proof of properties, etc.
Method integration offers a promising compromise. Such an approach
exploits the benefits of both structured and formal methods, preserving
an intuitive graphical notation and the ability to prove properties. The
approach is of particular benefit in the area of realtime systems. We
illustate the integration of a popular structured development method (JSD),
which is assigned a formal semantics in terms of a variant of CSP,
augmented with TLZ, itself a hybrid of Z and TLA, which addresses
statebased aspects. The formalization suggests modifications to JSD
which make it particularly suitable for use with realtime systems
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