From
Applied Formal Methods — FM-Trends 98 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1641/1999), Springer, 1999.


Abstract:
We provide an introduction to a practical method for rigorous system development which has been used successfully, under industrial constraints, for design and analysis of complex hardware/software systems. The method allows one to start system development with a trustworthy high level system specification and to link such a "ground
model" in a well documented and inspectable way through intermediate design steps to its implementation. The method enhances traditional operational modelling and analysis techniques by incorporatingthe most general abstraction, decomposition and refinement mechanisms which have become available through Gurevich's Abstract State Ma-
chines. Through its versatility the ASM approach is non-monolithic and
integratable at any development level into current design and analysis
environments. We also collect experimental evidence for the ASM thesis,
a generalization of Turing's thesis.