Monday 2nd July 2007 - co-located with IFM 2007 -
St Anne's College, Oxford
REFINE
2007 - International Refinement Workshop
Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering: the process of developing a more detailed design or implementation from an abstract specification through a sequence of mathematically-based steps that maintain correctness with respect to the original specification.
The aim of this Refinement Workshop is to bring together people who are interested in the development of more concrete designs or executable programs from abstract specifications using formal notations, tool support for formal software development, and practical experience with formal refinement methodologies. The workshop is organized by RefineNet network, a British network funded by the EPSRC, with the support of BCS FACS.
The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, and discussion of common ground and key differences.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Submissions will be reviewed, and workshop proceedings will appear in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). BCS-FACS will provide a best paper prize. Special issues of "Formal Aspects of Computing" journal have been produced containing extended papers from the last few refinement workshops. A similar arrangement is envisaged for the 2007 edition. These would be refereed in the usual fashion prior to acceptance by the journal.
The Refinement workshop will take place on Monday 2nd July 2007, as one of the workshops of the IFM 2007 conference organised by the University of Oxford.
Papers should be submitted in ENTCS style in Postscript or PDF format by e-mail
to reach John Derrick by 4th May, 2007.
They should be no longer than 25 pages prepared using the ENTCS macros
(available from the table given
here).
As usual, authors are advised to use the file example.tex that's
included in the generic ENTCS macro package (see
information and instructions) as a
template for their papers.
This workshop continues a long tradition in refinement workshops run under the auspices of the British Computer Society (BCS) FACS special interest group. Running since 1988, previous refinement workshops have been held at Cambridge, London, Bath etc.
In 1998 the BCS refinement workshop was combined with the Australasian Refinement Workshop to form the International Refinement Workshop, hosted at alongside Formal Methods Pacific 1998 at The Australian National University.
In 2002, the Refinement Workshop was held as an FME workshop in Copenhagen. Proceedings appeared in ENTCS Vol.70(3), and a special issue of the Formal Aspects of Computing journal based on the workshop appeared in 2003 (Vol. 15:1-2). In 2005, the workshop was co-located with the ZB conference held at the University of Surrey, Guildford. Proceedings appeared in ENTCS Vol.137(2), and a special issue of the Formal Aspects of Computing journal containing extensions of a number of papers appeared in 2006 (Vol. 18:3). In 2006, the workshop was co-located with the ICFEM conference organised by the UNU-IIST and the University of Macau, proceedings will appear soon in ENTCS, and a special issue of the Formal Aspects of Computing journal is under preparation.
The Workshop Webpage will be available from http://www.refinenet.org.uk/