AsmEE: an Eclipse plug-in in a metamodel based framework for the Abstract State Machines

The Abstract State Machines are a formal method successfully employed as system engineering method that guides the development of complex systems seamlessly from requirements capture to their implementation. Several tools supporting the ASMs have been developed in the past. To integrate these different tools and technologies we have proposed a metamodel based framework, called ASMETA, for the ASM. ASMETA includes a set of integrated tools and libraries, and can be integrated itself with the Eclipse project. In this paper we present the initial results of such integration, which consists in a Eclipse plug-in, called AsmEE, for editing and simulating ASM specifications. We present the AsmEE architecture, its features and capability and how they have been realized. Moreover we present the future work in the direction of a stronger integration between ASMETA and Eclipse.