Formal Specification of a Voice Communication System Used in Air Traffic Control

A joint project of the Austrian company Frequentis1 and the Technical University Graz demonstrates the applicability of executable formal models2. The formal method VDM++ has been applied to specify a safety critical voice communication system (VCS) for air-traffic control. Besides the expected improvement of the informal speciffication documents, 64 defects have been found, the efficiency of the system test-cases to cover the functionality of the VCS has been analyzed. In order to get a test-coverage measure, the formal specification has been animated with existing system test-cases using IFAD’s VDMTools.

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