DASH: A New Language for Declarative Behavioural Requirements with Control State Hierarchy

Abstract

We present DASH, a new language for describing formal behavioural models of requirements. DASH combines the ability to write abstract, declarative transitions (as in Z or Alloy) with a labelled control state hierarchy (as in the Statecharts family of languages). The key contribution of DASH is the combination of explicit support for user-level abstractions that create and factor sets of transitions, such as state hierarchy, and the use of full first-order logic to describe the transitions.