Specifying electronic health system with vienna development method specification language

Abstract

The Field of Formal Methods (FM) is a growing field that uses mathematical notations for making accurate and unambiguous specifications, so that in the early phases of software development discrepancies and errors are identified. By using the popular kind of formal methods i.e. VDM, the quality of design, system specification and verification of software can be improved effectively. In this paper, formal specification of an e-Health system is described by using VDM-SL. VDM-SL is a popular formal method used for the specification of software and hardware systems. Formal methods are not only applicable for creating and verifying specifications of mission critical systems, but also for the business and commercial systems, we can use formal methods. This paper is a motivation to use formal methods for creating specifications, validating and verifying specifications of software systems. In this way, development time, testing and maintenance cost in building software is greatly reduced.