Promoting Models

Qin Li, Yongxin Zhao, Xiaofeng Wu, Si Liu

Abstract: There can be multitudinous models specifying aspects of the same system. Each model has a bias towards one aspect. These models often override in specific aspects though they have different expressions. A specification written in one model can be refined by introducing additional information from other models. The paper proposes a concept of promoting models which is a methodology to obtain refinements with support from cooperating models. It refines a primary model by integrating the information from a secondary model. The promotion principle is not merely an academic point, but also a reliable and robust engineering technique which can be used to develop software and hardware systems. It can also check the consistency between two specifications from different models. A case of modeling a simple online shopping system with the cooperation of the guarded design model and CSP model illustrates the practicability of the promotion principle.