ABZ languages and tools in industrial-scale application

Abstract

We give an early view of an ongoing evaluation of ABZ-style languages and their accompanying tools. The target is specifications of safety- and security-critical (software-rich) systems. Our perspective is that of long-term users of formal methods in all parts of the development life cycle. The evaluation’s scope is the production of specifications. We list requirements for producing specifications, including semantic needs and the resulting requirements on language expressiveness, as well as requirements on tool support for writing, structuring, exploring, and validating specifications. We define criteria for industrial suitability – in our experience – of ABZ languages. We believe that specification structuring is a major discriminating factor for industrial scale-up. So we present an (informal) classification of such mechanisms and illustrate their use by reference to the largest formal specification written by Altran. Our lack of industrial-scale experience in some languages means we are still learning the best mechanisms to use in some cases. We welcome input on this. Finally we discuss remaining work.