A formal specification is presented in the Z language for a simplified version of the Single Transferable Vote form of election. This is a correctness-critical application which is one of a class of related and interesting applications, i.e. electoral models. This specification is based on the form of election defined by the Students’ Representative Council of the University of Cape Town , and ...

A formal specification of a multi-level marketing (MLM) business is presented. Specifying a MLM business boils down to specifying properties of and operations on mathematical forests and trees. The usefulness of the model-based specification language, Z, is investigated as a vehicle for a formal specification of these recursive structures. The specification is presented following a prescribed f...

The International Grand Challenge project on Verified Software is a long-term research program involving people from all over the world and is aimed to stimulate the creation of new theories and tools to be applied on industrial-scale problems. One of the challenges proposed is to make a formal development of a cardiac pacemaker. In this paper, we present a formal specification of this system u...

This paper describes an exercise in object-oriented modelling where Formal Concept Analysis is applied to a formal specification case study using Object-Z. In particular, the informal description from the case study is treated as a set of use-cases from which candidate classes and objects are derived. The resulting class structure is contrasted with the existing Object-Z design and the two appr...

Formal program development has gained widespread academic interest as a rigorous software engineering technique. One of the main hurdles for the wider IT industry in adopting these formal techniques is a lack of tools to support their use in combination with more traditional development techniques. This paper describes an integrated environment for object-oriented software development which inc...

ÐThis paper describes the use of formal development methods on an industrial safety-critical application. The Z notation was used for documenting the system specification and part of the design, and the SPARK subset of Ada was used for coding. However, perhaps the most distinctive nature of the project lies in the amount of proof that was carried out: proofs were carried out both at the Z level...

Research into the industrial application of formal methods has concentrated almost exclusively on the speci cation of software systems in highrisk or safety critical applications|thus, attention has been directed to technical problems with technical systems. The Formal Methods Research Group at Curtin University has, however, been addressing the potential practical application of Z and Object-Z...

Formal methods for software development are becoming increasingly necessary as softwarebecomes an important part of everyday life. To handle the complexities inherent in large-scale software systems these methods need to be combined with a sound developmentmethodology which supports modularity and reusability. Object orientation, based on theconcept that systems are composed of ...

In this paper, we present a novel use of the formal specification language Z for the construction of constraint problem models. These models can then be refined into constraint programs. Z’s expressiveness and suitability is proven by contrasting Z with three existing abstract constraint languages and by, successfully and efficiently, specifying numerous constraint and optimisation benchmark pr...

A report is given on work undertaken to produce a struc-tured speciication in Z of a model which aims to capture the essential abstractions of hypertext systems. The speciication is presented in part and the potential value of this speciication to the hypertext community is explored and discussed. We argue that this speciication provides a framework for hypertext systems in that it provides: ex...