A rigorous approach to reviewing formal specifications

Abstract

A new approach to rigorously reviewing formal specifications to ensure their internal consistency and validity is forwarded. This approach includes four steps: (1) deriving properties as review targets based on the syntax and semantics of the specification, (2) building a review task tree to present all the necessary review tasks for each property, (3) carrying out reviews based on the review task tree, and (4) analyzing the review results to determine whether faults are detected or not. We apply this technique to the SOFL specification language, which is an integrated formalism of VDM, Petri nets, and data flow diagrams to discuss how each step is performed.