Formal Methods for software development have remained nothing more than a laboratory curiosity for the last 20 years. Why is ASD different?
Traditional formal methods have suffered from three main problems: 1) They are not understandable by non formal methods experts, such as the customer; 2) they are in general more complicated and costly to apply than the problem they are trying to solve; 3) they are not scalable to real world systems. For this reason the application of traditional formal methods has largely been limited to safety critical systems. ASD addresses these and many of the other problems associated with traditional formal methods: 1) by embedding all the difficult mathematics in the ASD:Suite and providing an easy-to-use desktop application, non formal methods experts can easily understand ASD designs; 2) ASD has been designed from the outset for industrial use, is easy to use, general purpose and extremely economic; 3) The mathematics underlying ASD, CSP, is compositional, meaning that ASD designs can be decomposed whilst retaining their mathematical integrity. This means that ASD can be used to design arbitr
