Formal Methods for Communication Services

We survey formal methods as they are applied to the development of communication services. We report on industrial and academic projects, consider different communication architectures and work related to the feature interaction problem. Based on our survey, the results reported in the literature and most importantly, on extensive discussions with industry, we investigate important industrial concerns and criticisms about the use of formal methods for the development of communication services. We report on a collaborative project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Swisscom, Alcatel and Thomson in which these industrial concerns have been taken into account from the very beginning. The results of this project are currently being integrated into an industrial software development platform.