Towards Enabling Overture as a Platform for Formal Notation IDEs

Abstract

Formal Methods tools will never have as many users as tools for popular programming languages and so the effort spent on constructing Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) will be orders of magnitudes lower than that of programming languages such as Java. This means newcomers to formal methods do not get the same user experience as with their favourite programming IDE. In order to improve this situation it is essential that efforts are combined so it is possible to reuse common features and thus not start from scratch every time. This paper presents the Overture platform where such a reuse philosophy is present. We give an overview of the platform itself as well as the extensibility principles that enable much of the reuse. The paper also contains several examples platform extensions, both in the form of new features and a new IDE supporting a new language.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Evaluating the suitability of state‐based formal methods for industrial deployment

“…However, Pandey and Batra say VDMTools lack usability, noting that “there is no internal editor for models,” so one has to use external editors. They also say that “the error list cannot be emptied and so it is hard to see which errors are new and which have already been fixed.” A recent work presented by Couto et al details how the Overture platform can be extended to support other methods and tools such as theorem proving through Isabelle, model checking through Microsoft Formula, simulation through ProB, and refinement through Maude …”

Enabling continuous integration in a formal methods setting

“…VDM is supported by the Overture tool [32,7]. Overture is structured around a common core, with various extensions providing different kinds of features including type checking, model execution and proof obligation generation.…”

“…In this paper, we describe a series of recent changes and improvements to the Overture tool [32,7] for the Vienna Development Method (VDM) [21] that facilitate its use under a DevOps paradigm (see Section 2.1 for background information on the Overture tool and the DevOps paradigm). Our contributions are as follows:…”

The evolution of VDM tools from the 1990s to 2015 and the influence of CAMILA

“…Overture has grown to support not only model-based design in VDM, but also collaborative and multidisciplinary design by linking other external tools, and has been increasingly engineered for extensibility [76,110,111,112,113]. In Symphony we showed the possibility of using Overture as a platform for a range of externally developed and internal tools.…”