Tactical Tools for Distributing VDM Specifications

A major issue in software engineering is the mastery of sofware design. The increasing distributed programming facilities open lots of new possibilities but make the task of designers more complex. Our work is to contribute to a rational design of real-sized distributable applications. We propose an approach based on the VDM formal method as support for the design phase and based on the Conic distributed language and environment as target for the implementation. We apply successive refinements on a VDM model so as to modify its distributability. The refinements are formalized, their validity is proved and they are tactical tools for a support environment of distributable software design. We express the general architecture of the resulting application into Conic.