A new style of formal methods course is described, based on a pragmatic approach that emphasizes testing. The course introduces students to formal specification using Z, and shows how formal specification and testing can benefit each other, in both the validation and verification phases. It uses a tools-based approach, with practical work that reinforces formal specification techniques as well ...

Several requirements specification styles for the specification of reactive systems have been proposed in the literature. Informal specifications are the most widely used in the software industry nowadays, mainly because they are “understandable” by domain experts and software engineers, and therefore can be included as part of a software contract. Unfortunately, because of the inherent ambigui...

Comprehensibility is often raised as a problem with formal notations, yet formal methods practitioners dispute this. In a survey, one interviewee said "formal specifications are no more difficult to understand than code". Measurement of comprehension is necessarily comparative and a useful comparison for a specification is against its implementation. Practitioners have an intuitive feel for the...

Software requirements testing and software design testing are very important and must be taken seriously. Specifications of software requirements and design must be verified and validated before the implementation. Many individuals involved in design still find that some of the techniques available for these tasks are difficult and far from practical. This paper presents simple and very practic...

Maintaining inter-actor connectivity is extremely crucial in mission-critical applications of Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs), as actors have to quickly plan optimal coordinated responses to detected events. Failure of a critical actor partitions the inter-actor network into disjoint segments besides leaving a coverage hole, and thus hinders the network operation. This paper presents...

This paper presents the results of the validation and verification of a crucial component of BOS, a large safety-critical system that decides when to close and open the Maeslantkering, a storm surge barrier near the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. BOS was specified in the formal language Z and model checking has been applied to some of its subsystems during its development. A lightweight ...

This chapter presents the results of the validation and verification of a crucial component of BOS, a large safety-critical system that decides when to close and open the Maeslantkering, a storm surge barrier near the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. BOS was specified in the formal language Z and model checking has been applied to some of its subsystems during its development. A lightweigh...

Formal methods such as Z are generally criticised for their lack of practical applicability. As in other areas of software engineering, patterns help to construct, analyse and describe formal texts. Once a method has a catalogue of patterns, development can proceed by applying patterns, and by moving from one sort of pattern to another. This paper illustrates a developmental use of patterns. Fi...

We present an outline of a process by which operational software requirements specifications can be written for Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The Z notation is used to specify the FCA model and the formal operations on it. We posit a novel approach whereby key features of Z and FCA can be integrated and put to work in contemporary software development, thus promoting operational specification ...

Formal specification can enhance the reliability of the embedded system and verify the system properties at the design stage. This paper presents a formal transformation approach for MARTE(Modeling and Analysis of Real Time and Embedded systems) model based on MDA(Model Driven Architecture), and defines the transformation rules of static and dynamic semantic between MARTE model and Object-Z mod...