Component Tools: Application and Integration of Formal Methods

The field of formal methods provides all kinds of powerful techniques for the specification, design, verification, validation, and start- up of systems. Unfortunately, the dierent techniques have dierent un- derlying formalisms and notations, they use dierent concepts and meth- ods, and they are supported by dierent and, in many cases, incompatible tools. Therefore, most applications of formal methods are restricted to one technique or formalism - though using several techniques in combi- nation would have many benefits. The Component Tools project aims at easing the application and the inte- gration of dierent formal methods with dierent underlying formalisms, notations and tools for some particular application area. To this end, Component Tools supports the definition of components with dierent underlying formal models for dierent purposes and a set of transforma- tions for dierent tools. Then, an engineer can use these components for designing, verifying, and validating a system with support from formal methods and their tools under a uniform visual user interface - without even knowing the details of the underlying formal methods. In this paper, we outline the basic idea, the concepts, and the main ingredients of Component Tools by using a simplified example from the area of flexible manufacturing systems.