Tool supported specification and simulation of distributed systems

The authors present prominent features of AUTOFOCUS, a tool prototype for the formally based development of reactive systems. AUTOFOCUS supports system development offering integrated, comprehensive and mainly graphical description techniques to specify both different views and different levels of abstraction of the system. To avoid ill-defined specifications, consistency conditions on these system descriptions can be formulated and checked. Furthermore, they show how consistent and executable specifications of systems or components can be animated using the Java code generation of the AUTOFOCUS simulator. Finally, they demonstrate how AUTOFOCUS can be used to simulate the specified system in its system environment using a graphic animation tool as an example