Mural A Formal Development Support System

Formal methods enable computer architecture and software design to be mathematically proved correct before they are implemented. The complexity and time-consuming nature of such proofs have limited the applications of formal methods in the main to defence and safety-critical applications. The mural project (a joint Alvey-funded project between Manchester University and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories) has developed a software support system to help the user of formal methods. mural has created a user-friendly software environment (with extensive use of windows) that makes best use of human talents to produce computer systems that are proved to be correctly designed. Professor Cliff Jones is internationally known as the developer of the VDM system of formal notation (Vienna Development Method). This book describes the requirements, concepts, and realisation of the mural system. The authors present systematically and completely the results of this substantial research project, from the basic theoretical level to its effective implementation. The book will be of equal interest to academics working on formal methods at research level (and perhaps to graduate research students), and to practitioners and software engineers who are using - or who will have to use for defence contracts, etc. - formal methods.

This year the SOFSEM conference is coming back to Milovy in Moravia to th be held for the 26 time. Although born as a local Czechoslovak event 25 years ago SOFSEM did not miss the opportunity oe red in 1989 by the newly found freedom in our part of Europe and has evolved into a full-?edged international conference. For all the changes, however, it has kept its generalist and mul- disciplinarycharacter.Thetracksofinvitedtalks,rangingfromTrendsinTheory to Software and Information Engineering, attest to this. Apart from the topics mentioned above, SOFSEM’99 oer s invited talks exploring core technologies, talks tracing the path from data to knowledge, and those describing a wide variety of applications. TherichcollectionofinvitedtalkspresentsonetraditionalfacetofSOFSEM: that of a winter school, in which IT researchers and professionals get an opp- tunity to see more of the large pasture of today’s computing than just their favourite grazing corner. To facilitate this purpose the prominent researchers delivering invited talks usually start with a broad overview of the state of the art in a wider area and then gradually focus on their particular subject.

This book summarizes work done by the authors under the Esprit Tool Use project (1985-1990), at GMD in Karlsruhe and at Berlin University of Technology. It provides a comprehensive description of the generic development language Deva designed by the authors. Much of the research reported in this monograph is inspired by the work of Michel Sintzoff on formal program development; he contributed an enlightening Foreword. Deva is essentially a typed functional language with certain deduction rules. The difference with ordinary languages is, of course, the application domain: the types serve here to express propositions such as specifications or programs, rather than just data classes. Its practical applicability was tested on several non-trivial case studies. The whole book is written using the DVWEB system, a WEB for Deva, beeing implemented at the Berlin University of Technology.

Formal methods enable computer architecture and software design to be mathematically proved correct before they are implemented. The complexity and time-consuming nature of such proofs have limited the applications of formal methods in the main to defence and safety-critical applications. The mural project (a joint Alvey-funded project between Manchester University and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories) has developed a software support system to help the user of formal methods. mural has created a user-friendly software environment (with extensive use of windows) that makes best use of human talents to produce computer systems that are proved to be correctly designed. Professor Cliff Jones is internationally known as the developer of the VDM system of formal notation (Vienna Development Method). This book describes the requirements, concepts, and realisation of the mural system. The authors present systematically and completely the results of this substantial research project, from the basic theoretical level to its effective implementation. The book will be of equal interest to academics working on formal methods at research level (and perhaps to graduate research students), and to practitioners and software engineers who are using - or who will have to use for defence contracts, etc. - formal methods.

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.

The proceedings of the fourth Vienna Development Method Symposium, VDM'91, are published here in two volumes. Previous VDM symposia were held in 1987 (LNCS 252), 1988 (LNCS 328), and 1990 (LNCS 428). The VDM symposia have been organized by VDM Europe, formed in 1985 as an advisory board sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities. The VDM Europe working group consisted of researchers, software engineers, and programmers, allinterested in promoting the industrial usage of formal methods for software development. The fourth VDM symposium presented not only VDM but also a large number of other methods for formal software development. Volume 1 contains conference contributions. It has four parts: contributions of invited speakers, papers, project reports, and tools demonstration abstracts. The emphasis is on methods and calculi for development, verification and verification tools support, experiences from doing developments, and the associated theoretical problems. Volume 2 contains four introductory tutorials (on LARCH, Refinement Calculus, VDM, and RAISE) and four advanced tutorials (on ABEL, PROSPECTRA, The B Method, and The Stack). They present a comprehensive account of the state of theart.

This volume contains the proceedings of the fIrst workshop held by the Theory and Formal Methods Section ofthe Imperial College Department of Computing. It contains papers from almost every member of the Section, from our long-term academic visitors, and from those who have recently left us. The papers fall into four broad areas: • semantics • concurrency • logic • specification with some papers spanning a number of disciplines. The subject material varies from work on mathematical foundations to practical applications of this theory, expressing the Section's commitment to both the foundations of computer science, and the application of theory to real computing problems. In preparing the workshop and these proceedings, care was taken to ensure that there were papers overviewing a field, as well as ones whose primary aim was to present new scientifIc results. This had a dual purpose: to bring our Section members up to speed in some of the areas being worked on by the Section; and to provide the reader of the proceedings not only with a good introduction to many of the specifIc areas being investigated by the Section, but also with details of some of our latest results. All the papers presented at the workshop were revised following comments made by the workshop participants, and all were subsequently reviewed by at least two people before producing the fInal versions contained in this volume.