Techniques for Reactive System Design: The Tools in TRADE

Reactive systems are systems whose purpose is to maintain a certain desirable state of affairs in their environment, and include information systems, groupware, workflow systems, and control software. The current generation of information system design methods cannot cope with the high demands that originate from mission-critical application, geographic distribution, and a mix of data-intensive, behavior-intensive and communication-intensive properties of many modern reactive systems. We define an approach to designing reactive software systems that deals with these dimensions by incorporating elements from various information system and software design techniques and extending this with formal specification techniques, in particular with model checking. We illustrate our approach with a smart card application and show how informal techniques can be combined with model checking.