COFRE: Environment for Specifying Coordination Requirements using Formal and Graphical Techniques

Abstract

Advances in computer science have enabled the development of more and more complex systems. One of the most powerful tools to manage these systems is coordination models and languages. However, a serious limitation of these models, with regard to their usability, is that they do not provide support to manage the coordination constraints from the early stages in the software life cycle. Indeed, while these models provide suitable support to structure the applications giving a separate treatment to coordination patterns and functional components at the implementation phase, they provide little support to deal with adequate treatment of such concerns in the requirements definition. Coordination models should be encompassing a methodology supporting the separation of concerns throughout the whole software development process. An example of such methodology is presented in this paper providing a graphic technique, a method of generating formal interpretable specifications for the reproduction of coordinated environments and an accordance checker to verify the system formal representation with regard to the graphic one. The method is based on the use of the formal language Maude (as a simulation tool) and Coordinated Roles as a coordination model