Call for Participation: Refinement Workshop

31 October 2005, an EPSRC RefineNet workshop will be held as part of

ICFEM 2005: the seventh International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods
University of Manchester, UK
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/icfem05/

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Invited speaker: Jean-Raymond Abrial (ETH, Zurich)

Title: Using Formally Defined Design Patterns to Improve System Developments

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. This meeting is organised by the EPSRC supported RefineNet network which brings together people from both academia and industry who are interested in refinement, and the tools supporting formal software development.

The ICFEM Workshop

The purpose of this one-day workshop is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, and provide an opportunity to discuss practical experiences using the diverse range formal refinement methodologies as well as their theoretical foundations. The emphasis will be on informal discussions centred around presentations. This meeting forms part of the regular meetings run by the RefineNet network, and is open to all with an interest in refinement.

Schedule

      0830 – 0930  Registration

      0930 – 1000  Colin Snook and Marina Walden – Refinement of Statemachines using Hierarchical States, Choice Points and Joins

      1000 – 1030  Mike Poppleton and Colin Snook – Using Refinement in Feature-Oriented Generic Specification

      1030 – 1100  Coffee

      1100 – 1130  Georg Struth – Regular Approaches to Refinement

      1130 – 1200  Joseph Morris, Malcolm Tyrrell and Andrew Butterfield – Building a Process Algebra on a Theory of Refinement

      1200 – 1230  John Derrick – Refinement and Approximations

      1230 – 1400  Lunch

      1400 – 1500  Invited speaker: Jean Raymond Abrial

      1500 – 1530  Thai Son Hoang – Multiple-Expectation Systems

      1530 – 1600  Coffee

      1600 – 1630  Heike Wehrheim – Refinement Across Views

      1630 – 1700  Steve Schneider – Non-Blocking Data Refinement and Traces-Divergences Semantics

      1700 – 1730  Steve Reeves and David Streader – Causal Process Algebra, or Always Getting the Right Drink from a Coffee Machine

      1730  Close

Registration

Online registration for the workshop is available at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/icfem05/

History of the workshop

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). This year the Refinement Workshop was co-located with the ZB conference at Guildford, Surrey. ENTCS proceedings have appeared, and a special issue of the Formal Aspects of Computing journal based on the workshop is under preparation.

The Workshop Webpages are available at http://www.refinenet.org.uk/

Organisers

  • Neil Evans, University of Southampton, UK
  • John Derrick, University of Sheffield, UK
  • EPSRC RefineNet network (www.refinenet.org.uk)