Industrial Experience Report on the Formal Specification of a Packet Filtering Language Using the K Framework
This addresses the issue of specification errors for engineers in industrial projects, but it is incremental as it applies an existing formal method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of ambiguous and error-prone non-formal specifications for project-specific filtering languages by using the K framework to formally specify a packet filtering language, resulting in an estimation of difficulty and benefits in an industrial setting.
Many project-specific languages, including in particular filtering languages, are defined using non-formal specifications written in natural languages. This leads to ambiguities and errors in the specification of those languages. This paper reports on an industrial experiment on using a tool-supported language specification framework (K) for the formal specification of the syntax and semantics of a filtering language having a complexity similar to those of real-life projects. This experimentation aims at estimating, in a specific industrial setting, the difficulty and benefits of formally specifying a packet filtering language using a tool-supported formal approach.