The ASM Workbench: an Open and Extensible Tool Environment for Abstract State Machines.
Giuseppe Del Castillo · 1998
State Machines Giuseppe Del Castillo [email protected] Heinz Nixdorf Institut, Universitat-GH Paderborn Furstenallee 11, 33102 Paderborn, Germany Abstract. Appropriate tool support is an essential factor for an effective application of formal methods to real-life specification and modelling tasks. However, the current state of the art of tool support for Abstract State Machines is not considered very satisfactory by practitioners. After discussing some possible reasons for this, we report about the ASM Workbench, an open and extensible tool environment developed in response to this situation. 1 Introduction and Motivation There is a wide agreement on the fact that some degree of tool support is necessary in order to gain practical advantages from the application of formal methods to concrete specification and modelling tasks. In fact, the spectrum of available tools supporting formal methods is at least as varied as the spectrum of formal methods themselves, including for inst...