A specification tool for cooperative engineering systems

Formal methods and tools are needed for quality software development. Their main contributions are: abstraction and proofs, and they are necessary to increase reliability and correctness in software development. Indeed they are intended to help users specify consistently their needs and verify them. That's the reason why formal techniques are at the present time, an active research topic. Mathematical techniques are the best way to prove or to verify the consistency of the specification of a given system or algorithm. But the difficulty to put into use these mathematical techniques involves of course various tools to be defined in order to assist design and to help users make the most out of formal approaches, without the apparent complexity of mathematical concepts. CAST (Computer-Aided Specification Tool), presented in this paper is one of these tools dedicated to make theoretical aspects of formal specifications accessible to persons who are not in the know. It allows designers specify processes in cooperative information environments. CAST is a graphical tool which provides a friendly user interface and allows the specification and of processes by representing them by automata. It provides an SCCS (Synchronous Calculus of Communicating Systems) specification. This tool is developed for the SHOOD project, which aims at providing tools and methods for the integration of engineering design systems.