Software Prototyping Formal Methods And Vdm

Knowledge-Based Software Engineering brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this important area. Knowledge-Based Software Engineering serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most important research issues in the field.

This book provides an introduction to program specification, illustrating the advantages it confers upon the software development process. Covering all three major specification languages (Larch, VDM, and Z), the book discusses specification in general, the abstraction process, the mathematical tools required, and the main formal methods.

The Software Life Cycle deals with the software lifecycle, that is, what exactly happens when software is developed. Topics covered include aspects of software engineering, structured techniques of software development, and software project management. The use of mathematics to design and develop computer systems is also discussed. This book is comprised of 20 chapters divided into four sections and begins with an overview of software engineering and software development, paying particular attention to the birth of software engineering and the introduction of formal methods of software development. The next section explores some aspects of software engineering that tend to get ignored in the literature, including functional programming, functional-programming languages, and relational databases. The reader is then introduced to structured methods of software development, along with software project management. The final chapter is devoted to software testing, which can be functional or nonfunctional. This monograph will be useful to software engineers and designers.

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.

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 volume presents the proceedings of the 2nd VDM-Europe Symposium held in Dublin, Ireland, September 12-16, 1988. VDM, the Vienna Development Method, is a formal method for software engineering. It is being applied to an increasing number of projects by companies throughout Europe and there is an active international research programme supporting this process. "VDM - The Way Ahead" is the second of a series of symposia sponsored by the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) and organised by VDM-Europe. The term "formal method" refers to mathematically formal software specification and production methods. These methods aim to increase the quality of software in two related ways: by improving the specification and by making verification during the software production process more effective and easier to audit. The symposium proceedings focus on five areas of interest: education and technology transfer, experience and use of VDM, tools and support environments, method development and foundation at work, the standardisation of VDM. The proceedings are of interest to all those concerned with the application of more rigorous approaches to software development and the associated theoretical foundations.

Contains papers presented at "Expert Systems 88", the eighth annual conference of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems, held in Brighton in December 1988. Covers many aspects of current work, in particular, theoretical topics, practical techniques and real applications of expert systems (a wide spectrum of commercial and industrial interest). The theme of the 1988 conference was "integrating with mainstream software development." No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR