Industrial Applications Of Formal Methods To Model Design And Analyze Computer Systems

Formal methods are mathematically-based techniques, often supported by reasoning tools, that can offer a rigorous and effective way to model, design and analyze computer systems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate international industrial experience in using formal methods. The cases selected are representative of industrial-grade projects and span a variety of application domains. The study had three main objectives: · To better inform deliberations within industry and government on standards and regulations; · To provide an authoritative record on the practical experience of formal methods to date; and À To suggest areas where future research and technology development are needed. This study was undertaken by three experts in formal methods and software engineering: Dan Craigen of ORA Canada, Susan Gerhart of Applied Formal Methods, and Ted Ralston of Ralston Research Associates. Robin Bloomfield of Adelard was involved with the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station Shutdown System case. Support for this study was provided by organizations in Canada and the United States. The Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada (AECB) provided support for Dan Craigen and for the technical editing provided by Karen Summerskill. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratories (NRL), Washington, DC, provided support for all three authors. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided support for Ted Ralston.

Today, formal methods are widely recognized as an essential step in the design process of industrial safety-critical systems. In its more general definition, the term formal methods encompasses all notations having a precise mathematical semantics, together with their associated analysis methods, that allow description and reasoning about the behavior of a system in a formal manner. Growing out of more than a decade of award-winning collaborative work within the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: A Survey of Applications presents a number of mainstream formal methods currently used for designing industrial critical systems, with a focus on model checking. The purpose of the book is threefold: to reduce the effort required to learn formal methods, which has been a major drawback for their industrial dissemination; to help designers to adopt the formal methods which are most appropriate for their systems; and to offer a panel of state-of-the-art techniques and tools for analyzing critical systems.

It was our great pleasure to hold the 2nd International Symposium onAutomated Te- nology on Veri?cation and Analysis (ATVA) in Taipei, Taiwan, ROC, October 31- November3,2004. TheseriesofATVAmeetingsisintendedforthepromotionofrelated research in eastern Asia. In the last decade, automated technology on veri?cation has become the new strength in industry and brought forward various hot research activities in both Europe and USA. In comparison, easternAsia has been quiet in the forum. With more and more IC design houses moving from SiliconValley to easternAsia, we believe this is a good time to start cultivating related research activities in the region. TheemphasisoftheATVAworkshopseriesisonvariousmechanicalandinformative techniques, which can give engineers valuable feedback to fast converge their designs according to the speci?cations. The scope of interest contains the following research - eas: model-checking theory, theorem-proving theory, state-space reduction techniques, languages in automated veri?cation, parametric analysis, optimization, formal perf- mance analysis, real-time systems, embedded systems, in?nite-state systems, Petri nets, UML, synthesis, tools, and practice in industry.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Formal Methods, SBMF 2012, held in Natal, Brazil, in September 2012; co-located with CBSoft 2012, the Third Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers presented cover a broad range of foundational and methodological issues in formal methods for the design and analysis of software and hardware systems as well as applications in various domains.

This extensively revised and updated new edition of Specification of Software Systems builds upon the original focus on software specification with added emphasis on the practice of formal methods for specification and verification activities for different types of software systems and at different stages of developing software systems. Topics and features: provides a wide coverage of formal specification techniques and a clear writing style, supported by end-of-chapter bibliographic notes for further reading; presents a logical structure, with sections devoted to specification fundamentals, basics of formalism, logic, set theory and relations, property-oriented specification methods, and model-based specification techniques; contains end-of-chapter exercises and numerous case studies, with potential course outlines suggested in the Preface; covers Object-Z, B-Method, and Calculus of Communicating Systems; offers material that can be taught with tool-supported laboratory projects.

In any serious engineering discipline, it would be unthinkable to construct a large system without having a precise notion of what is to be built and without verifying how the system is expected to function. Software engineering is no different in this respect. Formal methods involve the use of mathematical notation and calculus in software development; such methods are difficult to apply to large-scale systems with practical constraints (e.g., limited developer skills, time and budget restrictions, changing requirements). Here Liu claims that formal engineering methods may bridge this gap. He advocates the incorporation of mathematical notation into the software engineering process, thus substantially improving the rigor, comprehensibility and effectiveness of the methods commonly used in industry. This book provides an introduction to the SOFL (Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language) method that was designed and industry-tested by the author. Written in a style suitable for lecture courses or for use by professionals, there are numerous exercises and a significant real-world case study, so the readers are provided with all the knowledge and examples needed to successfully apply the method in their own projects.

Presents a novel design that allows for a great deal of customization, which many current methods fail to include; Details a flexible, comprehensive design that can be easily extended when necessary; Proven results: the versatility of the design has been effectively tested in implementations ranging from microcontrollers to supercomputers