LOTOSphere:software development with LOTOS

LOTOS (Language Of Temporal Ordering Specification) became an international standard in 1989, although application of preliminary versions of the language to communication services and protocols of the ISO/OSI family dates back to 1984. This history of the use of LOTOS made it apparent that more advantages than the pure production of standard reference documents were to be expected from the use of such formal description techniques. LOTOSphere: Software Development with LOTOS describes in depth a five year project that moved LOTOS out of the ISO tower into software engineering practice. LOTOS became a vehicle for efficient, yet formally based industrial software specification, design, verification, implementation and testing. LOTOSphere: Software Development with LOTOS is divided into six parts. The first introduces the reader to LOTOS and the project LOTOSphere. The five remaining each treat an important part of the software development life cycle using LOTOS. This is the first book to give a comprehensive treatment of the use of these formal description techniques in a software engineering environment. It will thus be a valuable reference for researchers and software developers and can also be used as a text for an advanced course on the subject

Formal description techniques for distributed computing systems:the challenges for the 1990's

Initially FDTs where developed within IS0 and CCITT for specification, at a high-level of abstraction, of distributed systems. Research is now being performed on the use of FDTs to support the complete implementation trajectory. In this paper we discuss a number of such research activities that are conducted within the framework of the Lotosphere project(*). The paper discusses aspects of design methodology, correctness preserving transformation, the reflection of design criteria, the role of pre-defined specification and implementation constructs, and formal approaches to conformance testing. Furthermore some insight is given in the development of a comprehensive toolset that supports these aspects of design methodology. The paper concludes with some experience obtained from the application of these methods and tools to some realistic pilot implementations: an ISDN and MHS application and a Transaction Processing application

Design and implementation strategies

This chapter addresses basically the pragmatic support for the production of a final implementation of a distributed information system, on basis of a high-level architectural design called initial architecture. This production process, which is called implementation phase ([G08]), is decomposed into two sub-phases. These two sub-phases share an intermediate design called reference implementation ([9])

LOTOS specification style for OSI

The architecture of OSI is used to derive guidelines for writing LOTOS specifications of distributed systems. In particular, the architectural concepts that underlie service and protocol designs are examined in detail. For each of these concepts a representation in LOTOS is given. Examples are provided of how the LOTOS representations of the concepts are used in the construction of LOTOS specifications of service and protocol designs. The approach described in this paper is motivated by the need to produce distributed system specifications in a more consistent and productive fashion

TP Protocol from Specification to Implementation

This chapter reports the design activity undertaken by the task-group that specifies and implements’ the TP specific components of OSI-TP. The design trajectory does not include the realization of the protocol, though some realization aspects are considered during the design process to enable a tailored implementation strategy. Only a subset of the TP-protocol functionality will be considered; only a profile of OSI-TP is selected as design example. These restrictions allo to focus on the main design issues instead of being entangled in complicated but irrelevant design details