Combining Formal Methods: An Exercise in Integration

Formal methods can rarely capture all the dimensions of a software project. Diierent aspects of a project are thus typically formalized separately, with little or no integration. We study here the integration of a formal speciication methods and a validation method. The methods that we use are Larch and PROMELA/spin. Larch is an algebraic speciication method, specialized in the speciication of abstract data types and their properties. PROMELA/spin is a modeling and veriication package for concurrent systems , based on a process/communication channel abstraction. We show how Larch provides a natural integration path for the two methods, describe the features of an integration language, and discuss the problems we have encountered.