Global and Communicating State Machine Models in Event Driven B: A Simple Railway Case Study

2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference

2010

International audienceWell specified requirements are crucial for good software design and domain engineering helps better understanding and specification of requirements. Safety critical domains, such as transportation, exhibit interesting features, such as high levels of non-determinism, complex interactions, stringent safety properties, multifaceted timing attributes, etc. The formal representation of these features is a challenging task. This paper presents our experience of modeling land transportation domain in the formal framework of Event-B. We explore the possibility of using Event-B as a domain engineering tool. We discuss the problems posed by the introduction of time and how we tackle it. We design a technique based on animation to validate domain models

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Domain Engineering with Event-B: Some Lessons We Learned

2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference

2010

“…Previously, Event-B has been employed for the development of transportation systems, see for instance [38,11,17]. But most of the time the role of this language was limited to system modeling of a particular problem.…”

Section: Event-b In the Transportation Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utilizing Event-B for domain engineering: a critical analysis

2011

Requirements Eng

This paper presents our experience of modeling land transportation domain in the formal framework of Event-B. Well-specified requirements are crucial for good software design; they depend on the understanding of the domain. Thus, domain engineering becomes an essential activity. The possibility to have a formal model of a domain, consistent with the use of formal methods for developing critical software working within it, is an important issue. Safety-critical domains, like transportation, exhibit interesting features, such as high levels of non-determinism, complex interactions, stringent safety properties, multifaceted timing attributes, etc. The formal representation of these features is a challenging task. We explore the possibility of utilizing Event-B as a domain engineering tool. We discuss the problems we faced during this exercise and how we tackled them. Special attention is devoted to the issue of the validation of the model, in particular with a technique based on the animation of specifications. Event-B is mature enough to be an effective tool to model domains except in some areas, temporal properties mainly, where more work is still needed.

“…Previously, Event-B has been used for the development of transportation systems, see for instance [20], [21], [22], but most of the time the role of this language was limited to system modeling of a particular component. Our work is different in a sense that we are modeling the domain, where such systems are assumed to operate.…”

Section: B Modeling Of the Transportation Domain In Event-bmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guidelines for Formal Domain Modeling in Event-B

2011 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High-Assurance Systems Engineering

2011

Abstract-In this paper, we explore the possibility to use Event-B as a formal domain modeling tool. We identify the areas where domain modelers can struggle and present some guidelines to avoid these pitfalls. We mainly address three questions about domain modeling: what to specify, how to refine, and how to verify. We discuss the strategy to express domain assumptions, protocols, time, and temporal properties. We also analyze the refinement and proof system of Event-B in this realm. We advocate small incremental steps and alternative refinement mechanisms, such as "observation levels." We find animation a very helpful activity to complement the verification process.