In this paper, we expose some exercises that we use to teach formal specification for 1 year students.

This paper presents the latest developments in the “Formal Methods in Conformance Testing” (FMCT) project of ISO and ITU–T. The project has been initiated to study the role of formal description techniques in the conformance testing process. The goal is to develop a standard that defines the meaning of conformance in the context of formal description techniques. We give an account of the curren...

We describe an approach for deening and making use of compositions of partial speciications written in diierent formal languages. The technique provides a rst step towards integrating formal methods that use the notations. We discuss the integration process and consider how reenement can occur in such a setting. We present several examples of formal heterogeneous speciications, and two examples...

This paper presents the use of role-based notions in the formal specification of a security policy. The formal method used is based on deontic logic, a logical formalism that seems particularly adapted for the specification of security properties. An outline of the main characteristics of this formalism and of the graphical notation used is presented through examples. The use of role-based abst...

Usually we teach formal methods relying for a large part on one kind of reasoning technique about a formal model. For instance, we either use formal proof or we use model-checking. It would appear that it is already hard enough to learn one technique and having to cope with two puts just another burden on the students. This is not our experience. Especially model-checking is easily used to comp...

Conservative extension is an important notion in the theory of formal specification [8]. If we can implement a specification SP, we can implement any conservative extension of SP as well. Hence, a specification can be shown consistent by starting with a consistent specification and extending it using a number of conservative extension steps. This is important, because during a formal developmen...

Formal Methods are mathematically-based techniques for software design and engineering, which enable the unambiguous description of reasoning about a system’s behaviour. Autonomous systems use to make decisions without human control, often embedded in robotic system, safety-critical, increasingly being introduced into everyday settings. need robust development verification methods, but formal m...

Using graphical description techniques for formal system development has become a common approach in many tools. Often multiple description techniques are used to represent different views of the same system, only together forming a complete specification. Here, the question of the integration of those description techniques and views becomes a major issue, raising questions of consistency and ...

Analyzing the provided variability in an evolving product line is necessary to determine if new products can be derived by configuration of existing product line assets. To analyze the provided variability, we need to identify the variation points, the variants, and its constraints. In this paper, we show how formal concept analysis can be used to derive this information.

We present a study regarding basic level of concepts in conceptual categorization. The basic level of concepts is an important phenomenon studied in the psychology of concepts. We propose to utilize this phenomenon in formal concept analysis to select important formal concepts. Such selection is critical because, as is well known, the number of all concepts extracted from data is usually large....