Computer networking is an important specialization in Information and Communication Technologies. However imparting the right knowledge to students can be a challenging task due to the fact that there is not enough time to deliver lengthy labs during normal lecture hours. Augmenting the use of physical machines with software tools help the students to learn beyond the limited lab sessions withi...

In most cases, it is simple inconvenience of use that keeps formal methods from being put to industrial use. This paper argues that functionalities, even though of simple formal principles, can be decisive for the applicability of such a formal development tool. Several of those functionalities, as found in the AUTOFOCUS tool prototype, like integrated graphical and hierarchical description tec...

We present a symbolic definition that captures some cases of election verifiability for electronic voting protocols. Our definition is given in terms of reachability assertions in the applied pi calculus and is amenable to automated reasoning using the software tool ProVerif. The definition distinguishes three aspects of verifiability, which we call individual, universal, and eligibility verifi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create a formal specification language for disaster plans in order to remove possible inconsistencies between disaster plans, and to enable the automated verification of properties from such plans against logs of actual incidents. Design/methodology/approach – Different types of properties in disaster plans have been identified and formalized using orde...

Although many attempts at automated aids for legal drafting have been made, they were based on the construction of a new tool, completely from scratch. This is at least curious, considering that a strong parallelism can be established between a normative document and a software specification: both describe what an entity should or should not do, can or cannot do. In this article we compare norm...

This paper discusses links that may be made between process models and UML software specification techniques, working from an argument that the whole complexity of organisational activity cannot be captured by UML alone. The approach taken is to develop a set of use cases which would be capable of providing information support to a pre-defined organisational process. The nature of the thinking ...

We describe the formal specification and verification of a new faulttolerant real-time communication protocol, called DoRiS, which is designed for supporting distributed real-time systems that use a shared high-bandwidth medium. Since such a kind of protocol is reasonably complex and requires high levels of confidence on both timing and safety properties, formal methods are useful. Indeed, the ...