Using a formal description technique to model aspects of a global air traffic telecommunications network

Abstract

Aspects of a draft version of the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN) Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) under development by ISO-compliant committees of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) have been mathematically modelled using a formal description technique. The ATN SARPs are a specification for a global telecommunications network for air traffic control systems. A version of Harel’s statecharts formalism embedded within a machine readable typed predicate logic has been used as a formal description technique to construct this mathematical model. Our model has been `typechecked’ to partially validate the internal consistency of the specification. The work described in this paper has already uncovered some problems in the draft SARPs, and will provide a basis for follow-on efforts to apply formal analysis methods such as model-checking and symbolic execution to aspects of the ATN SARPs. The success of this approach suggests that typed predicate logic is useful as a syntactic and semantic foundation for specialized Formal Description Techniques (FDTs).

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-0-387-35271-8_26.pdf

• http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-0-387-35271-8_26,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35271-8_26

• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-35271-8_26,

http://core.ac.uk/display/23703805,

https://www.scipedia.com/public/Andrews_et_al_2013a,

https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/forte/forte1997.html#AndrewsDJ97,

https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-387-35271-8_26,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/1511289226