Applying research results in the industrial environment: The case of the TRIO specification language

Abstract

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.

In this paper, a short introduction to the TRIO language is provided; then the experience on its practical application is briefly reported; finally comments are given on the most important “lessons learned” from the above experience. It is argued that, on the basis of this and similar experiences, new enthusiasm and useful indications for hoping into greater success of formal methods can be generated.

Work partially supported by CNR and partially by ENEL.