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Deriving Specifications of Dependable Systems: toward a method

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Manuel Mazzara

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Abstract

This paper proposes a method for deriving for- mal specifications of systems. To accomplish this task we pass through a non trivial number of steps, concepts and tools where the first one, the most important, is the concept of method itself, since we realized that computer science has a proliferation of languages but very few methods. We also propose the idea of Layered Fault Tolerant Specifica- tion (LFTS) to make the method extensible to Dependable Systems. The principle is layering the specification, for the sake of clarity, in (at least) two different levels, the first one for the normal behavior and the others (if more than one) for the abnormal. The abnormal behavior is described in terms of an Error Injector (EI) which represents a model of the erroneous interference coming from the environment. This structure has been inspired by the notion of idealized fault tolerant component but the combination of LFTS and EI us- ing rely guarantee thinking to describe interference can be considered one of the main contributions of this work. The progress toward this method and the way to layer specifica- tions has been made experimenting on the Transportation and the Automotive Case Studies of the DEPLOY project.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Mazzara M

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 2009

Pages: 11

Print publication date: 01/05/2009

Source Publication Date: May 2009

Report Number: 1152

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne

URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1152.pdf


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