PROOFS - APPLICATION ENGINEERING BASED ON FORMAL METHODS

The objective of the PROOFS project is to show that formal methods, are useful for the development of distributed industrial applications. Several application areas have been taken into account. A common feature of the selected applications is that they are heterogeneous, distributed systems. Since different aspects of a system have to be described and analyzed, different formalisms should be used. Instead of defining a new integrated formalism that covers all the aspects, in PROOFS guidelines are developed to integrate in a coherent way several existing formalisms. As a consequence 'linking' of formalisms and related methods and tools will be attempted instead of 'merging' them. In this paper we give an overview of the project as a whole, of the applications we have chosen to test formal techniques and of the problems of linking formalisms, methods and supporting tools.