Structural Specification of a Distributed System Using I ⁵

A unified architectural specification framework for organizing the designs of distributed systems and their constituent components, and for documenting configuration and deployment constraints of distributed systems is presented in [3]. This multi-level specification framework, called I ⁵, can be a valuable tool used for specifying complex distributed systems. I ⁵ includes five definition languages, backed by a formally specified model, used to define a distributed system in an increasing level of detail to capture software and hardware components and their interactions. In this extended abstract, we present a practical application of I ⁵. We demonstrate how I ⁵ can be used to specify a distributed system in a comprehensive way that incorporates subtle aspects of distributed object-oriented systems, which are prone to be left out, or be under-specified, when using ad hoc or simplistic specification frameworks. The distributed application used in this work is a real-world example based on a submarine data collection and distribution system, deployed over a network. The use of I ⁵ yielded the specification of the system that makes explicit many of the implied, or specified informally, aspects of the system and its components.