Formal methods: Importance, experience, and comparative analysis

Formal Method for Automated Transformation of Lotos Specifications to Estelle Specifications

“…It has been proven that any Lotos specification can be given in terms of only two operators: the sequencing operator and the choice operator [26]. Given this and that we have demonstrated the applicability of our method to a specification that involves recursion and internal events, the applicability of our method to any other Lotos specifications is confidently expected.…”

“…This confirms the points stated in Sec. 1 and elaborated in [26] about the merits of formal methods over intuitive methods (time and cost saving).…”

“…The development life cycle includes the specification, the design, the verification of the designs, the implementation of the designs, and the testing of the implementations. This motivated the development of formal methods for all of these phases [19,26].…”

“…This results from the following systematic steps. If the method facilitates full automation, it results in significant time saving [26]. (4) Less costly because it is less time consuming and can be applied by less qualified experts (sometimes can be applied by a software program) [26].…”

“…The formalization does not apply to specifications that involve recursion or different parallel composition operators. Also, it is based on the work on canon-ical testers which has been proven in [19,24,26] to be circular and suffers from fundamental problems. Furthermore, it does not address the generation of a specific Estelle specification corresponding to a specific Lotos specification.…”