Welcome to Overture

In the period 1992-1995, the object-oriented version of the formal specification language VDM-SL, called VDM++, was developed though the European Commission's Afrodite project. VDM++ was used in a wide range of commercial and research projects. This also led to the development of a commercially available, industry strength tool (VDMTools) by the Danish company IFAD. Recently, in January 2005, a book appeared (Validated Designs for Object-oriented Systems, Fitzgerald et al.) that illustrates the use of VDM++ technology, including a number of industrial case studies.

Third Overture Workshop on 27-28 November 2006 at Newcastle University, UK

At the beginning of 2004 the authors of this book began to realise that new insights in tool support for formal specification languages, the use of new technologies such as XML, and the current trend in open source software were good incentives for starting the development of a second tool set supporting the use of VDM++. This open source project has been named Overture.

Currently a basic toolset exists (VDM++ to XML parser, as an Eclipse plug-in), and students from Denmark (Technical University of Denmark) and Portugal (University of Minho) are already working on improvements and further developments. The open source project is hosted at SourceForge. You can download the current binary release of the Overture tools by pointing your local Eclipse installation to www.overturetool.org/updatesite.