Tools for producing formal specifications : a view of current architectures and future directions

During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirements engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. They offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avoid ambiguity in specifications. However, the process of obtaining formal specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence various researchers are developing systems that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a number of key issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realise the proposed architecture

Object Oriented Concepts Identification from Formal B Specifications

AbstractThis paper addresses the graphical representation of static aspects of B specifications, using UML class diagrams. These diagrams can help understand the specification for stakeholders who are not familiar with the B method, such as customers or certification authorities. The paper first discusses some rules for a preliminary derivation of a class diagram. It then studies the consistency of the concepts preliminarily identified from an object oriented point of view. A formal concept analysis technique is used to distinguish between consistent classes, attributes, associations and operations. The proposed technique is to incrementally add operations to the formal specification which automatically result in evolution of the class diagram