Formal Specification of Distributed Information Systems

The design of distributed information systems tends to be complex and therefore error-prone. However, in the field of monolithic, i.e. non-distributed, information systems much has already been achieved, and by now, the principles of their design seem to be fairly well-understood. The past decade has shown also remarkable progress in the development and application of formal methods for distributed systems, in particular in the area of protocol systems. For both application areas techniques and tools have been developed that have been accepted by considerable user communities. The project we describe here aims to study the combination of two formalisms that have been (largely) developed at the University of Twente, viz. the process algebraic protocol specification language LOTOS and the object-oriented database specification language TM. Its objective is to combine the strengths of both formalisms and their associated tools for the specification, verification, testing, and design of distributed information systems