Automata Describing Object Behavior
This work addresses software engineers by providing formal methods to improve object-oriented development, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing refinement techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing object-oriented software development by relating formal refinement techniques to commercial methods, presenting an automata model with denotational and operational semantics to describe object behavior and defining refinement rules applicable in practice, especially with inheritance.
Relating formal re nement techniques with commercial object oriented software development methods is important to achieve enhancement of the power and exibility of these software development methods and tools. We will present an automata model together with a denotational and an operational semantics to describe the behavior of objects. Based on the given semantics we de ne a set of powerful re nement rules and discuss their applicability in software engineering practice especially with the use of inheritance.