A REVIEW OF OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACHES IN FORMAL METHODS

This paper presents a survey of recent approaches in the application o f the object-oriented paradigm to formal specification, The complexity of current information systems demands the use of a higher degree of formalism in the development process, Formal languages such as Z, VDM and Lotos have been used extensively in academic environments and rese arch projects; however, their utilization in the 'real world' is still relatively small, The use of object-oriented concepts has now been su ggested as a good solution to the lack of expressiveness that characte rizes most of these languages, Several approaches addressing this issu e have appeared in the literature recently, including extensions to mo st existing languages, In this paper we review some of these technique s and discuss problems and issues relevant to the combination of forma l methods and object orientation.