As computers increasingly control the systems and services we depend upon within our daily lives like transport, communications, and the media, ensuring these systems function correctly is of utmost importance. This book consists of twelve chapters and one historical account that were presented at a workshop in London in 2015, marking the 25th anniversary of the European ESPRIT Basic Research project ‘ProCoS’ (Provably Correct Systems). The ProCoS I and II projects pioneered and accelerated the automation of verification techniques, resulting in a wide range of applications within many trades and sectors such as aerospace, electronics, communications, and retail. The following topics are covered: An historical account of the ProCoS project Hybrid Systems Correctness of Concurrent Algorithms Interfaces and Linking Automatic Verification Run-time Assertions Checking Formal and Semi-Formal Methods Provably Correct Systems provides researchers, designers and engineers with a complete overview of the ProCoS initiative, past and present, and explores current developments and perspectives within the field.

Computers are gaining more and more control over systems that we use or rely on in our daily lives, privately as well as professionally. In safety-critical applications, as well as in others, it is of paramount importance that systems controled by a computer or computing systems themselves reliably behave in accordance with the specification and requirements, in other words: here correctness of the system, of its software and hardware is crucial. In order to cope with this callenge, software engineers and computer scientists need to understand the foundations of programming, how different formal theories are linked together, how compilers correctly translate high-level programs into machine code, and why transformations performed are justifiable. This book presents 17 mutually reviewed invited papers organized in sections on methodology, programming, automation, compilation, and application.

Presenting a theory of the theoryless, a computer scientist provides a model of how effective behavior can be learned even in a world as complex as our own, shedding new light on human nature.

As the complexity of embedded computer-controlled systems increases, the present industrial practice for their development gives cause for concern, especially for safety-critical applications where human lives are at stake. The use of software in such systems has increased enormously in the last decade. Formal methods, based on firm mathematical foundations, provide one means to help with reducing the risk of introducing errors during specification and development. There is currently much interest in both academic and industrial circles concerning the issues involved, but the techniques still need further investigation and promulgation to make their widespread use a reality. This book presents results of research into techniques to aid the formal verification of mixed hardware/software systems. Aspects of system specification and verification from requirements down to the underlying hardware are addressed, with particular regard to real-time issues. The work presented is largely based around the Occam programming language and Transputer microprocessor paradigm. The HOL theorem prover, based on higher order logic, has mainly been used in the application of machine-checked proofs. The book describes research work undertaken on the collaborative UK DTI/SERC-funded Information Engineering Dictorate Safemos project. The partners were Inmos Ltd., Cambridge SRI, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, who investigated the problems of formally verifying embedded systems. The most important results of the project are presented in the form of a series of interrelated chapters by project members and associated personnel. In addition, overviews of two other ventures with similar objectives are included as appendices. The material in this book is intended for computing science researchers and advanced industrial practitioners interested in the application of formal methods to real-time safety-critical systems at all levels of abstraction from requirements to hardware. In addition, material of a more general nature is presented, which may be of interest to managers in charge of projects applying formal methods, especially for safety-critical-systems, and others who are considering their use.

This book investigates the design of compilers for procedural languages, based on the algebraic laws which these languages satisfy. The particular strategy adopted is to reduce an arbitrary source program to a general normal form, capable of representing an arbitrary target machine. This is achieved by a series of normal form reduction theorems which are proved algebraically from the more basic laws. The normal form and the related reduction theorems can then be instantiated to design compilers for distinct target machines. This constitutes the main novelty of the author's approach to compilation, together with the fact that the entire process is formalised within a single and uniform semantic framework of a procedural language and its algberaic laws. Furthermore, by mechanising the approach using the OBJ3 term rewriting system it is shown that a prototype compiler is developed as a byproduct of its own proof of correctness.

This Festschrift volume, dedicated to He Jifeng on the occasion of his 70th birthday in September 2013, includes 24 refereed papers by leading researchers, current and former colleagues, who congratulated at a celebratory symposium held in Shanghai, China, in the course of the 10th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2013. The papers cover a broad spectrum of subjects, from foundational and theoretical topics to programs and systems issues and to applications, comprising formal methods, software and systems modeling, semantics, laws of programming, specification and verification, as well as logics. He Jifeng is known for his seminal work in the theories of programming and formal methods for software engineering. He is particularly associated with Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP) , the theory of data refinement and the laws of programming, and the rCOS formal method for object and component system construction. His book on UTP with Tony Hoare has been widely read and followed by a large number of researchers, and it has been used in many postgraduate courses. He was a senior researcher at Oxford during 1984-1998, and then a senior research fellow at the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) in Macau during 1998-2005. He has been a professor and currently the Dean of the Institute of Software Engineering at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. In 2005, He Jifeng was elected as an academician to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of York. He won a number of prestigious science and technology awards, including a 2nd prize of Natural Science Award from the State Council of China, a 1st prize of Natural Science Award from the Ministry of Education of China, a 1st prize of Technology Innovation from the Ministry of Electronic Industry, and a number awards from Shanghai government.

This volume constitutes revised selected papers from the four workshops collocated with the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, SEFM 2021, held virtually during December 6–10, 2021. The 21 contributed papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 29 submissions. The book also contains 3 invited talks. SEFM 2021 presents the following four workshops: CIFMA 2021 - 3rd International Workshop on Cognition: Interdisciplinary Foundations, Models and Applications;CoSim-CPS 2021 - 5th Workshop on Formal Co-Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems;OpenCERT 2021 - 10th International Workshop on Open Community approaches to Education, Research and Technology;ASYDE 2021 - 3rd International Workshop on Automated and verifiable Software sYstem Development. Due to the Corona pandemic this event was held virtually.

The focus of this book is on bridging the gap between two extreme methods for developing software. On the one hand, there are texts and approaches that are so formal that they scare off all but the most dedicated theoretical computer scientists. On the other, there are some who believe that any measure of formality is a waste of time, resulting in software that is developed by following gut feelings and intuitions. Kourie and Watson advocate an approach known as “correctness-by-construction,” a technique to derive algorithms that relies on formal theory, but that requires such theory to be deployed in a very systematic and pragmatic way. First they provide the key theoretical background (like first-order predicate logic or refinement laws) that is needed to understand and apply the method. They then detail a series of graded examples ranging from binary search to lattice cover graph construction and finite automata minimization in order to show how it can be applied to increasingly complex algorithmic problems. The principal purpose of this book is to change the way software developers approach their task at programming-in-the-small level, with a view to improving code quality. Thus it coheres with both the IEEE’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) recommendations, which identifies themes covered in this book as part of the software engineer’s arsenal of tools and methods, and with the goals of the Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT) initiative, which aims to “refound software engineering based on a solid theory.”

This Festschrift was published in honor of Egon Börger on the occasion of his 75th birthday. It acknowledges Prof. Börger's inspiration as a scientist, author, mentor, and community organizer. Dedicated to a pioneer in the fields of logic and computer science, Egon Börger's research interests are unusual in scope, from programming languages to hardware architectures, software architectures, control systems, workflow and interaction patterns, business processes, web applications, and concurrent systems. The 18 invited contributions in this volume are by leading researchers in the areas of software engineering, programming languages, business information systems, and computer science logic.