Applying Research Results in the Industrial Environment: the Case of the TRIO Specification

摘要

There are almost universal complaints that too much research effort goes wasted and never finds application in the industrial world, The complaints are raised symmetrically both by the academia and by the industrial world. This situation becomes even more frustrating in the case of application of formal methods to software engineering: despite formal methods are advocated as a useful tool to enhance software quality from more than thirty years, it is still quite controversial whether or not they can really have an impact on the industrial software development. This paper addresses the above issue on the basis of author's experience. This experience has been developed for several years in the field of real-time systems. The core of the research is a formal specification language for real-time systems, TRIO, which is an extension of temporal logic. The language has been enriched by supporting tools and methods and has been applied to real industrial projects of increasing complexity.