Introducing SDL'92 in the development of TMN applications

This paper presents an approach that introduces the formal Specification and Description Language (SDL) in the development of TMN applications. Based on the application development phases „analysis“, „design“, „implementation“ it will be outlined which particular specifics of TMN applications have to be taken into account and how SDL can be used to ease the development of TMN based management systems. The presented approach supports system development by using object oriented analysis and SDL'92 design together in a coherent way: OMT (Object Modeling Technique by Rumbough) is used for system analysis and SDL'92 for system design. Due to the formal nature of SDL a thorough specification of the system behavior can be performed and implementations can be semiautomatically generated from this specification. Commercially available tools already support simulation, validation and code generation for SDL systems. The described methodology is applied for the development of prototype management applications in the ACTS project MOON.