On checking the consistency of Object-Z classes

Requirements elicitation involves gathering requirements from different stakeholders. Different stakeholders often hold different views of how a system should behave, resulting in inconsistencies between their descriptions. Rigorous consistency checking methods can be effectively applied if the different views are formally specified. This is possible because of the unambiguous and precise nature of formal specification languages. However, ensuring that each formal view is self-consistent is critical before checking that the different views are inter-consistent. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to check the self-consistency of the classes of an Object-Z specification. The proposed approach combines specification testing, model abstraction, and model checking to perform the verification.