Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
Refine
Document Type
- Report (4) (remove)
Language
- English (4)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Keywords
- Extraction (1)
- Formal Semantics (1)
- Profiles (1)
- SDL (1)
Faculty / Organisational entity
This report explains basic notions and concepts of Abstract State Machines (ASM) as well as notation for defining ASM models. The objective here is to provide an intuitive understanding of the formalism; for a rigorous definition of the mathematical foundations of ASM, the reader is referred to [2] and [3]. Further references on ASM-related material can be found on the ASM Web Pages [1].
Over a period of 30 years, ITU-T’s Specification and Description Language (SDL) has matured to a sophisticated formal modelling language for distributed systems and communication protocols. The language definition of SDL-2000, the latest version of SDL, is complex and difficult to maintain. Full tool support for SDL is costly to implement. Therefore, only subsets of SDL are currently supported by tools. These SDL subsets - called SDL profiles - already cover a wide range of systems, and are often suffcient in practice. In this report, we present our approach for extracting the formal semantics for SDL profiles from the complete SDL semantics. We then formalise the approach, present our SDL-profile tool, and report on our experiences.
The Basic Reference Model of ODP introduces a number of basic concepts in order to provide a common basis for the development of a coherent set of standards. To achieve this objective, a clear understanding of the basic concepts is one prerequisite. This paper makes an effort at clarifying some of the basic concepts independently of standardized or non-standardized formal description techniques. Among the basic concepts considered here are: agent, action, interaction, interaction point, architecture, behaviour, system, composition, refinement, and abstraction. In a case study, it is then shown how these basic concepts can be represented in a formal specification written in temporal logic.
UML and SDL are languages for the development of software systems that have different origins, and have evolved separately for many years. Recently, it can be observed that OMG and ITU, the standardisation bodies responsible for UML and SDL, respectively, are making efforts to harmonise these languages. So far, harmonisation takes place mainly on a conceptual level, by extending and aligning the set of language concepts. In this paper, we argue that harmonisation of languages can be approached both from a syntactic and semantic perspective. We show how a common syntactical basis can be derived from the analysis of the UML meta-model
and the SDL abstract grammar. For this purpose, conceptually sound and well-founded mappings from meta-models to abstract grammars and vice versa are defined and applied. On the semantic level, a comparison between corresponding language constructs is performed.