An integrated environment for communication software design

In communication software design, it is important to describe the specification efficiently without any errors or ambiguity. For this purpose, several formal description techniques have been proposed to ensure rigorous specifications. In addition, it is necessary to facilitate the generation of highly reliable specification by using a computer, namely by application of CASE tools. We propose an integrated support environment, named ITECS, which has been developed to support the design of highly reliable communication software efficiently. ITECS has the following characteristics: it is based on the formal description technique LOTOS, to describe the specification rigorously; it has two specification functions to support editing of message sequence charts and graphical LOTOS specifications; it has verification functions to verify the consistency between two LOTOS specifications in the refinement process of design, and to verify the temporal properties within a single specification. This paper mainly discusses the verification support functions of ITECS in particular