Aspect-Oriented Formal Specification for Real-Time Systems - Advances in Computational Science and Engineering - page 13

Aspect-Oriented Formal Specification for Real-Time
Systems
Lichen Zhang
Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
Guangdong University of Technology
Guangzhou 510090, China
[e-mail]
Abstract. This paper presents an approach for specifying real-time systems
based on aspect-oriented formal specification, which exploits the advantages
and capacity of existing formal specification languages. Increasing complexity
can be deal with aspect-oriented development design methods and dependabil-
ity of real-time systems requires that formal development methods be applied
during real-time system development cycle. The non-functional features can be
separated from real-time systems based on separation of concerns, and ex-
pressed as non-functional aspects by formal methods. There is no requirement
that different aspects of a system should be expressed in the same formal tech-
nique. So the different aspects can be specified by one formal specification
technique or different formal specification techniques. In this paper we provide
some ideas for aspect-oriented formal specification of real-time systems. Three
examples illustrate the specification process of aspect-oriented formal specifica-
tion for real-time systems.
Keywords: Aspect-Oriented, Real-Time Systems, Formal Specification.
1 Introduction
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) [1] is a new software development technique,
which is based on the separation of concerns. Systems could be separated into different
crosscutting concerns and designed independently by using AOP techniques. Every
concern is called an “aspect”. Before AOP, as applications became more sophisticated,
important program design decisions were difficult to capture in actual code. The imple-
mentation of the design decisions were scattered throughout, resulting in tangled code
that was hard to develop and maintain. But AOP techniques can solve the problem
above well, and increase comprehensibility, adaptability, and reusability of the system.
AOSD model separates systems into tow parts: the core component and aspects.
When designing the system, aspects are analyzed and designed separately from the
system's core functionality, such as real-time, security, error and exception handling,
log, synchronization, scheduling, optimization, communication, resource sharing and
distribution. After the aspects are implemented, they can be woven into the system