FASTEN

Homepage

• FASTEN Home - https://sites.google.com/site/fastenroot/

Community

• Questions about using and extending FASTEN: fasten-support@googlegroups.com
• If you encounter problems, please open an issue here

Versions

• Get the latest release

Project Structure

FASTEN is organized as several MPS projects under code/languages/:

• com.mpsbasics — generic MPS-language-development utilities, not specific to any business domain. Also bundles a few broader integrations (JIRA, GenAI/langchain4j, PDF import/export) that aren't purely language-authoring tooling.
• com.fasten.symo (SYstemsMOdeling) — generic systems-engineering abstractions usable across projects: a base layer plus PlantUML-diagramming and SysML/hardware-modeling extensions.
• End-user-facing domain languages — com.mbeddr.formal.safety (model-based safety engineering and assurance, by far the most active), plus com.mbeddr.formal.req, cprover, nusmv, prism, smt, spin (requirements and formal-methods backends).
• com.mbeddr.formal.repo_admin — cross-cutting: linters plus a formal architecture description (com.fasten.meta.architecture) enforcing dependency rules across the projects above. Nothing else is allowed to depend on repo_admin's own modules.

Three tutorial projects (code/tutorial, code/tutorial-mdcc, code/tutorial-safety) demonstrate the end-user-facing functionality and contain no language definitions of their own.

The enforced architecture is more granular than this summary — e.g. safety alone is six named sub-components, symo splits into a base layer with named extensions, and there's a documented "quarantine" component for known, accepted layering exceptions. Treat com.fasten.meta.architecture (open it via MPS MCP tools from the repo_admin project) as the authoritative source for the actual dependency graph — this summary is oriented for newcomers, not a substitute for it.

One known wrinkle: the fasten_base_languages component — a shared foundation (com.mbeddr.formal.base, .base.arch, .base.analyses, .base.tabular, etc.) used by multiple domain languages — has no directory of its own; its modules currently live nested inside code/languages/com.mbeddr.formal.nusmv/.

Building (from command line)

For building FASTEN we have Gradle-based scripts which automatically manage all needed dependencies including MPS itself and build the languages.

1. configure the needed variables in gradle.properties:
   • copy the gradle.properties.example as gradle.properties and replace "<...>" with your paths, github-username and a token with rights to access github-packages
     • in Windows please note that the paths should use slash instead of back-slash, and they must NOT contain any space character (' ') - e.g.

       mpsHomeDir=C:/work/MPS_2025.1
       mbeddr.formal.home=C:/work/mbeddr.formal
       gpr.user=<a github user name>
       gpr.token=<token for package access>

     • in Unix-based systems we have the "unix paths" (nothing changes)
2. run gradlew.bat- this starts the default task which downloads dependencies and builds FASTEN languages
   • if you want to build the standalone distribution (RCP) run gradlew.bat build_fasten_safety_distribution
     • you can find the zip in the directory "build\artifacts\com.mbeddr.formal.safetyDistribution"

Building (from MPS)

1. download and install MPS 2025.1
2. run gradlew.bat setup. You can skip this step if you have built the project with Gradle already.
3. start MPS
4. in 'Settings->Appearance & Behavior->Path Variables', set the path variable mbeddr.formal.home to point to the directory which contains the cloned 'mbeddr.formal' repository.
5. FASTEN sources are organized in several MPS projects. To build FASTEN, each of these projects need to be built. Please open and build the projects in the following order:
   1. code\languages\com.mpsbasics
   2. code\languages\com.mbeddr.formal.nusmv
      1. after this build is successful, you should be able to open the code\tutorial project (contains only SMV-based DSLs)
   3. code\languages\com.mbeddr.formal.req
   4. code\languages\com.mbeddr.formal.spin
   5. code\languages\com.mbeddr.formal.safety

After the above steps you should be able to open code\tutorial-safety project - it contains the DSLs related to safety.