Research

From Wiki.overturetool.org

This page gives access to the curent research agenda for the Overture VDM group. We use the page to identify and prioritise open research questions and to ensure that we are working in a complementary way.

Please go ahead and add open questions to the emerging lists under each strand below

If you would like to contribute to any of the topics listed on this page, feel free to get in touch with the listed Contact for the area that interests you.

Our aim is to ensure that by 2015:

• VDM should be a leading vehicle for work on grand challenges in computing and interdisciplinary approaches to modelling and developing a range of systems including real-time, embedded and distributed systems.

• Overture should be a recognised leading experimental framework for developing new plug-ins in support of analysing o-o structured formal models, especially for real-time, embedded and distributed systems. VDMTools should be an even more efficient tool aimed for industrial usage and promising prototype features from Overture are also incorporated.

• VDM is being used publicly in large-scale industry projects in Japan and is on trend of increasing application in Europe and in the US.

Currently the SRA is structured as three key research strands:

• Semantics: the aim of semantics research is to develop a formal semantics, broadly accepted by the community, that covers the object-oriented structuring and concurrency present in the language extensions. The semantics strand is described on the Semantics Page.
• Methods and Applications: the aim of this strand is to develop a practically useful methodology around the use of VDM. This will not be prescriptive, but will be a record of experience in the form of application stories, libraries of model templates and patterns. The Methods and Applications strand is described on the Methods+Apps page.
• Tooling: the aim of this strand is to have the Overture tool suite as a solid basis on top of the Eclipse platform that can be used seriously for both academic and industrial purposes. This tool suite will be able to support all VDM dialects and additional languages which are inspired from VDM. The tools strand is described on the Tools page.

Cutting across the strands, we are addressing a series of specific challenges which will help us to monitor our progress and provide a concrete focus.