Formal specification of telephone systems in LOTOS: the constraint-oriented style approach

Faci, Mohammed; Logrippo, Luigi; Stepien, Bernard

doi:10.1016/0169-7552(91)90073-l

Cited by 30 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The internal insight helps to transform the formal specification into a final implementation of the resource, because the style gives many hints to develop data and program structures of the final implementation. Finally, all the modules are composed to obtain the overall behaviour of the system using resourceoriented style [46,17].…”

Section: Architecture Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generic Formal Framework for Constructing Agent Interaction Protocols

Chen

Sadaoui

2005

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

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Agent interaction protocols (AIP) design is one of the principal issues for building multiagent systems. Indeed, the construction of AIP should integrate theories, methodologies and tools. We propose in this paper a unifying framework that provides a generic agent architecture to be reused as well as a methodology to construct and refine AIP specifications in an incremental way. This framework is based on the highly expressive formal language Lotos and its related technologies, such as finite state machines and temporal logics. Hence, the proposed framework also facilitates formal validation and verification of AIP specifications using rigorous tools. We argue that there are three layers of semantics of Lotos specifications that can improve Lotos expressivity in describing agent interaction. Therefore, this framework can describe almost all aspects of agent interaction and at different abstraction levels. In addition, we demonstrate how to generate an online auction protocol from the generic framework, and how to validate and verify this protocol.

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Section: Architecture Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Generic Formal Framework for Constructing Agent Interaction Protocols

Chen

Sadaoui

2005

Int. J. Soft. Eng. Knowl. Eng.

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“…In the telephony area there is a simple example of a three-way synchronization that can be used for specifying the busy behavior of a phone or circuit. In the example below, a ring action results from synchronization between two processes both offering a ring action, and the fact that a phone can be busy is specified by a third parallel behavior , with a predicate stating that the called phone should not be in the list of busy phones [10]. The third parallel action could be offered by a sub-process of the switch process or by some process representing a resource such as a Service Control Point, a database, etc.…”

Section: Lotos Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is called multi-way synchronization, and is often used to specify the combination of constraints in a system (hence the term constraint-oriented style [30] [25] [10]). In the telephony area there is a simple example of a three-way synchronization that can be used for specifying the busy behavior of a phone or circuit.…”

Section: Lotos Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Graphic visualization and animation of LOTOS execution traces

Stepien

Logrippo

2002

Computer Networks

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Abstract. Two types of visualization and animation tools for LOTOS execution traces are presented: a translator from LOTOS traces to Message Sequence Charts and a graphic animator. These are made possible by enforcing specific LOTOS styles and by providing certain mappings between the elements of LOTOS actions and the elements of the graphic notation. The main application area considered is the visualization and animation of specifications of telephony systems. The use of these tools in software design is discussed briefly. MotivationThe LOTOS language [3][15] [21][29] is one of the standard Formal Description Techniques (FDTs) that have been used widely to specify many kinds of distributed systems, especially in the telecommunications area. The semantics of LOTOS is based on algebraic concepts and it can be used to describe systems at several levels of abstraction and in several ways, some of which may describe the constraints that determine the system behavior rather than the system architecture [30] [29][11]. This is an advantage because of various reasons: the language can be used in several phases of the software development cycle (from requirements to implementation [29] [1]); it provides flexibility to address a variety of applications; and it lends itself to many design and validation techniques. On the other hand this very quality has been an obstacle to industrial adoption, since the language has been perceived as difficult to learn and use, one of the reasons being the absence of generally valid correspondences between system concepts and specification concepts.In papers that present LOTOS specifications, structural diagrams are often used [20][11]. This is useful in order to describe the components of a system and their external interaction points (the gates) but is not useful during the specification validation phase, neither to understand traces, nor to help in the exploration of alternative behaviors in a step-bystep approach. A graphic syntax for LOTOS, called G-LOTOS, was defined [5]. Graphi-

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“…As an example of use of the language, the well known POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) [FaLS91] application is presented. First, the general architecture is discussed and it is shown how the concepts of objects and interfaces apply to this example.…”

Section: Specifying Telephone Systems Using Odp-dlcompmentioning

confidence: 99%

An experience modelling telecommunications systems using ODP-DLcomp

Stepien

Farooqui

Logrippo

1997

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Abstract. The ODP-DLcomp language is intended to describe systems in the ODP computational model. It is object-oriented, implementation-independent and its formal semantics are based on LOTOS, thus it is a Formal Description Technique. It supports specification of interface and object templates, with appropriate creation and binding operations. An application of the language is demonstrated using the Plain Old Telephone System example.Keywords: Open Distributed Processing, OO Languages, Specification, Telephony IntroductionODP-DLcomp was designed and implemented at GMD-FOKUS by Frank Koch [Koch94]. The first author participated in the group at the time.The motivation behind this new language was to offer a more readable and compact alternative to the LOTOS description of the ODP computational model [Vog93] but also to offer a bridge between Formal Description Techniques and Object Oriented implementation languages.In this paper, we show that ODP-DLcomp includes all the essential concepts for system definition in the ODP computational model. It is high-level and object-based. One of its important characteristics is that its semantics are defined in terms of the formal language LOTOS[BoBr87] [LoFH92]. In fact, the definition is constructive and a prototype compiler from ODP-DLcomp into LOTOS is available. Thus, the language has all the essential characteristics required of a Formal Description Technique for ODP. Because of their capability of being compiled into a language that is at least partially executable, specifications written in ODP-DLcomp constitute a prototype of the system being specified. Activities such as validation and test case generation, possible from LOTOS specifications, therefore are also possible from ODP-DLcomp specifications.This language is somewhat comparable to TINA ODL [TINAC94], however the latter is not formal, and does not offer the capability of behavior specification.A brief introduction to the language is given, followed by an example of its use for the description of a Plain Old Telephone System. Basic concepts of ODP computational modelThe ODP computational viewpoint provides the concepts needed to explain how services can be programmed in a form suitable for distribution [FLM95]. This viewpoint focuses on the organization of applications in architecturally conformant ways rather than on the mechanisms used to distribute or support the applications in the system. The ODP com-2 putational model is the abstract model to express the concepts of the computational viewpoint. It is a framework for describing the structure, specification and execution of the (components of the) distributed application on the distributed computing platform. It describes the coarse-grained structure of an application, i.e., the application components and their interaction at an abstract, system independent level. Each coarse-grained entity of a distributed application is represented by an object, called computational object, with a (set of) well defined interface(s), called computational interface(s). Th...

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Formal specification of telephone systems in LOTOS: the constraint-oriented style approach

Cited by 30 publications

References 4 publications

A Generic Formal Framework for Constructing Agent Interaction Protocols

A Generic Formal Framework for Constructing Agent Interaction Protocols

Graphic visualization and animation of LOTOS execution traces

An experience modelling telecommunications systems using ODP-DLcomp

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