Formalizing GDMO Action and Notification Definitions - Results from a Case Study

One of the main problems in GDMO is the lack of adequate means to define the behavior of managed objects. This paper reports the experiences that have been gained in the GDMO project, a joint project of Deutsche Telekom AG and the Institute for Software Technology, with formalizing actions and notifications of a sample GDMO specification. It has been investigated how different formal description techniques (FDTs), namely an object-oriented Z dialect and SDL, may be used to describe the semantics of actions and notifications. However, the case study showed that an integration of FDTs into GDMO is technically difficult and not very likely to improve the overall quality of GDMO specifications.