Behavioral specification of GOF design patterns with LOTOS

Abstract

Software patterns such as gang-of-four (GOF) design patterns are a promising approach for developing software of high quality with less effort. To design larger and complicated software, we often combine design patterns into a larger one, and in this situation obtaining a consistent combination of patterns is important. More concretely, the techniques for checking if the combined patterns are consistently collaborated from a behavioral view is a crucial issue. We propose a technique to define the behavior of the design patterns based on the formal description technique LOTOS (Language of Temporal Ordering Specification). By executing the behavioral descriptions on a LOTOS simulator, we can check the behavioral consistency of the patterns. We also illustrate how our technique works well by using the combination of GOF composite and command patterns.