Real-Time Animation for Formal Specification

International audienceA formal specification is a mathematical description of a given system. Writing a formal specification for real-life, industrial problems is a difficult and error prone task, even for experts in formal methods. It is crucial to get the approval and feedback when domain experts have a lack of knowledge of any specification language, to avoid the cost of changing a specification at later stage of development. This paper introduces a new functional architecture, together with a direct and efficient method of using real-time data set, in a formal model without generating the legacy source code in any target language. The implemented architecture consists of six main units. These units are: Data acquisition and preprocessing unit; Feature extraction unit; Database; Graphical animations dedicated tool: Macromedia Flash; Formal model animation tool Brama plug-in to interface between Flash animation and Event-B model; and formal specification system Event-B. These units are invoked independently and allow for simple algorithms to be executed concurrently. All the units of this proposed architecture help to animate the formal model with real-time data set and offer an easy way for specifiers to build a domain specific visualization that can be used by domain experts to check whether a formal specification corresponds to their expectations