Due to the pervasiveness of diagrams in human communication and because of the increasing availability of graphical notations in Software Engineering, the study of diagrammatic notations is at the forefront of many research e orts. The expressive power of these kinds of languages and notations can be remarkably improved by adding extensibility mechanisms. Extensibility, the ability of a notatio...

Formal methods have an important role in ensuring the correctness of safety critical systems. However, their application in industry is always cumbersome: the lack of experts and the complexity of formal languages prevents the efficient application of formal verification techniques. In this paper we take a step in the direction of making formal modelling simpler by introducing a framework which...

A new approach to the formal specification of software design methods, such as ER or State Transition Diagrams, is presented. A formal language based on semantic constraints is used to specify those methods. An example using the UML’s Activity Diagrams is given which illustrates the proposed approach. The aim of this work is to provide a bridge across the gap between the formal methods and the ...

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are often classified into external and internal DSLs. An external DSL is a stand-alone language with its own parser. An internal DSL is an extension of an existing programming language, the host language, offering the user of the DSL domain-specific constructs as well as the constructs of the host language, thus providing a richer language than the DSL itself. I...

In this paper, we apply our timing fault modeling strategy to writing formal specifications for communication protocols. Using the formal language of Specification and Description Language (SDL), we specify the Controller process of rail-road crossing system, a popular benchmark for real-time systems. Our extended finite state machine (EFSM) model has the capability of representing a class of t...

The purpose of formal and so called semi-formal approaches to business process modeling is to provide a general technique for the development of workflow based information systems. For this, a concise and repeatable transformation of initial requirements into the final system must be achieved. Moreover, there is also a need for complex models to include justifications that explain the meaning a...

We introduce the SDIF Stream Relationships Language (“SDIF-SRL”), a formal language for describing the relationships among streams in an SDIF file. SDIF-SRL is based on XML, the “Extensible Markup Language,” an emerging standard for data modeling and representation. We describe the structure of SRL and its use in several applications.

The paper summarises our experiences teaching formal program specification and verification using the specification language JML and the automated program verification tool ESC/Java2. This technology has proven to be mature and simple enough to introduce students to formal methods, even undergraduate students with no prior knowledge of formal methods and even only very basic knowledge of (Java)...