An Overview of Formal Specification Languages and Tools Supporting Visualisation of System Development

A formal development approach is required for high-quality development of safety critical systems. In order to make the formal development process more feasible, tool support is needed. Furthermore, integrating visualization means to the process makes it easier to communicate the model and to observe its behavior at an early development stage. These efforts are, however, not always enough to make the formal development process feasible for industrial use. Therefore, to make the process smoother and more flexible for industrial applications, it also needs to be parallelized. In this report we give an overview of the state-of-the-art of formal specification languages that are used in industrial settings. Tools supporting these methods in combination with different visualization means to facilitate the formal development are also presented. Parallelizing the formal development process by dividing a model into multiple abstractions that capture different aspects of the model is suggested as an approach to make the process more flexible.