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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Manuel Mazzara
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.
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