Behavioral specification of GOF design patterns with LOTOS

Software patterns such as Gang-Of-Four (GOF) design patterns are one of the promising approaches to develop software of high quality with less efforts. To design larger and complicated software, we often combine design patterns into larger one, and in this situation the significant point is how to get consistent combination of the patterns. More concretely, the techniques to check if the combined patterns are consistently collaborated from behavioral view is one of the crucial issues. In this paper, we proposed the technique to define the behavior of the design patterns based on the formal description technique LOTOS (Language of Temporal Ordering Specification). By executing the behavioral descriptions on a LOTOS simulator, we can check the behavioral consistency of the patterns. We also illustrate how our technique works well by using the combination of GOF Composite and Command patterns.