An Open Environment for the Integration of Heterogeneous Modelling Techniques and Tools

Even though the development of formal methods makes steady progress with respect to techniques and tool support, their acceptance in industry is still relatively low. One reason for this probably stems from the fact that most formal approaches require users to forget about their conventional techniques and tools, and to relearn in a new environment. What makes this switch even harder to accept: due to their research character, tools for formal methods can usually not compete w.r.t. convenience, stability, and degree of integration to conventional, state-of-the-art commercial tools. Applying modern repository-based integration techniques to tools for formal methods can overcome some of these drawbacks. Moreover, an incremental migration, in which users can continue to apply their established conventional techniques and tools, adding formal support in degrees as desired, seems to be promising for bringing formal methods to practice. A framework based on the idea of combining established modelling techniques and tools with formal ones has been developed in the context of the Espress project: among others, Statecharts [8], a widely used graphical notation for reactive behavior, are combined with the formal notation Z [20], and with temporal logic [3, 2]. The resulting combined notation is supported by a speci cation methodology [7] and, last but not least, by an open and scalable tool integration environment { the design principles of which will be sketched in this paper.