Doron A. Peled - Böcker

The book 'formal methods for software' presents a collection of current methods for dealing with software reliability. It compares between these methods, and shows their advantages and disadvantages. The book presents a description of the techniques, intended for a nonexpert audience with some minimal technical background (e.g., some training in software engineering, or basic computer science courses). It also describes some advanced techniques, aimed at researchers and practitioners in software engineering. This text/reference is intended to be used as an introduction to software methods techniques, a source for learning about various ways to enhanced software reliability, a reference on formal methods technique, and also as a basis for a one semester university course in this subject. It suggests various projects and exercises for achieving "hands-on" experience with the various formal methods tools.

Many books focus on increasing the quality of software through the use of formal methods. However, most books embrace one particular method, and present it as the suggested solution for the software reliability problem. This book presents a wider picture of formal methods, through a collection of notations and techniques. It compares them, and discusses their advantages and disadvantages. One of the main challenges of formal methods is in transferring the tech­ nology developed by researchers to the software development community. Re­ cently, we seem to be starting to have a better understanding of the important ingredients of formal methods tools. This manifests itself in the growing ac­ ceptance of such tools in the software and hardware development industry. Ideally, formal methods need to be intuitive to use (preferably using graphi­ cal interfaces), do not impose on the user an extensive learning period, and incur only small overhead to the development process. Formal methods are much more acceptable today than ten or twenty years ago, in particular in the hardware industry. Yet there is still a lively contention between different approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 6. 1 International Conference on Formal Techniques for Networked and Distributed Systems, FORTE 2002, held in Houston, Texas, USA in November 2002. The 22 revised full papers, 2 tool papers, and 2 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. All current aspects of formal method for distributed systems and communication protocols are addressed, in particular formal specification, testing, and verification of such systems.

ThisvolumecontainstheproceedingsoftheconferenceonComputer AidedVe- ?cation, CAV 2004,held in Boston,Massachusetts,USA, July13-17,2004.CAV 2004 was the 16th in a series of conferences dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of computer-assisted formal analysis methods for software and hardware systems. The conference covers the spectrum from theoretical - sults to concrete applications, with an emphasis on practical veri?cation tools and the algorithms and techniques that are needed for their implementation. The conference has traditionally drawn participation from researchersas well as practitioners in both academia and industry. CAV 2004 was colocated with the ACM International Symposium on So- ware Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2004), and was partially sponsored by the ACMSIGSOFT.Thecolocationre?ectstheincreasingsynergybetweenresearch on veri?cation and testing, and emerging applications of formal veri?cation to softwareanalysis.Joint CAV-ISSTA events included a distinguished plenary l- ture by David Harel and a special session exploring various approaches to the speci?cation and veri?cation of concurrent software organized by Shaz Qadeer.

The Automated Technology for Veri?cation and Analysis (ATVA) international symposium series was initiated in 2003, responding to a growing interest in formal veri?cation spurred by the booming IT industry, particularly hardware design and manufacturing in East Asia. Its purpose is to promote research on automated veri?cation and analysis in the region by providing a forum for int- action between the regional and the international research/industrial commu- ties of the ?eld. ATVA 2005, the third of the ATVA series, was held in Taipei, Taiwan, October 4–7, 2005. The main theme of the symposium encompasses - sign, complexities, tools, and applications of automated methods for veri?cation and analysis. The symposium was co-located and had a two-day overlap with FORTE 2005, which was held October 2–5, 2005. We received a total of 95 submissions from 17 countries. Each submission was assigned to three Program Committee members, who were helped by their subreviewers, for rigorous and fair evaluation. The ?nal deliberation by the P- gram Committee was conducted over email for a duration of about 10 days after nearly all review reports had been collected. In the end, 33 papers were - lectedforinclusionintheprogram.ATVA2005hadthreekeynotespeechesgiven respectively by Amir Pnueli (joint with FORTE 2005), Zohar Manna, and Wo- gang Thomas. The main symposium was preceded by a tutorial day, consisting of three two-hour lectures given also by the keynote speakers.

th This volumecontains the proceedingsof the 9 internationalconference onV- i?cation, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2008), held in San Francisco, January 7-9, 2008. The purpose of VMCAI is to provide a forum for researchers from three communities-Veri?cation, Model Checking, and - stractInterpretation-thatwill facilitate interaction,cross-fertilization,andthe advance of hybridmethods that combine the three areas.With the growingneed for formal tools to reason about complex, in?nite-state, and embedded systems, such hybrid methods are bound to be of great importance. Topics covered by VMCAI include program veri?cation, program certi?- tion, model checking, debugging techniques, abstract interpretation, abstract domains, static analysis, type systems, deductive methods, and optimization. VMCAI 2008 was the 9th VMCAI meeting. Previous meetings were held in Port Je?erson 1997, Pisa 1998, Venice 2002, New York 2003, Venice 2004, Paris 2005, Charleston 2006, and Nice 2007. The program committee selected 21 papers out of over 60 on the basis of at least three reviews. The principal criteria were relevance and quality.The program of VMCAI 2008 included, in addition to the research papers, three invited talks, by Radhia Cousot, Maurice Herlihy and Neil Jones, and three tutorials, by Orna Kupferman, Jens Palsberg, and Marco Pistoia. We would like to thank the ProgramCommittee members and the reviewers, without whose dedicated e?ort the conference would not have been possible. Our thanks also to the Steering Committee members for their helpful advice.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence, MOCHART 2008, held in Patras, Greece, in July 2008 as a satellite event of ECAI 2008, the 18th biannual European conference on Artificial Intelligence. The 9 revised full workshop papers presented together with 2 invited lectures have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement and were carefully selected for inclusion in the book. The workshop covers all ideas, research, experiments and tools that relate to both MC and AI fields.