The use of VDM within the Alvey Flagship project

Abstract

In Flagship, we have attempted to perform a very gradual introduction of the use of formal methods without proclaiming it to be the answer to all of our problems. Since this is not a formal methods project, our primary concern has been to gain some benefit from the use of formal methods, rather than to research their use in an industrial environment.

In particular, this led us to drive our development process towards a particular declarative environment which might not otherwise have been considered in a formal methods project. Hopefully this use of a declarative environment will give us great benefits in terms of fine-grain concurrency when we are able to develop our software on the Flagship parallel hardware.