Michael G. Hinchey - Böcker

Industrial Strength Formal Methods in Practice provides hands-on experience and guidance for anyone who needs to apply formal methods successfully in an industrial context. Each chapter is written by an expert in software engineering or formal methods, and contains background information, introductions to the techniques being used, actual fragments of formalised components, details of results and an analysis of the overall approach. It provides specific details on how to produce high-quality software that comes in on-time and within budget. Aimed mainly at practitioners in software engineering and formal methods, this book will also be of interest to the following groups; academic researchers working in formal methods who are interested in evidence of their success and in how they can be applied on an industrial scale, and students on advanced software engineering courses who need real-life specifications and examples on which to base their work.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, FAABS 2004, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA in April 2004.The 18 revised full papers and 4 revised poster papers presented have gone through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Among the topics addressed are agent management systems, norms in agent societies, multi-agent systems reliability, agent architectures, multi-agent systems specification, formal methods, potential energy in multi-agent systems, timed automata, model checking, OBDDs, multi-agent systems verification, agent communication protocols, autonomic agents, and Petri nets.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, FAABS 2002, held in Greenbelt, MD, in October 2002.The 18 revised full papers and 5 poster papers presented together with 9 panel statements and summaries were carefully selected for presentation during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. Among the topics addressed are formal models for agent communication, communication protocols, logic-based agents, statechart frameworks, formal specification of agent interaction, space shuttle applications, automated satellite ground operations, formal verification, agent control, multi-agent coordination, agent languages, mobile agent testing, battlefield agents, XML, autonomous agents, etc.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems, FAABS 2000, held in Greenbelt, MD, USA, in April 2000.The 22 revised full papers presented together with 13 posters and two panel discussion reports were carefully reviewed and improved for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on verifying agents' mental states, synthesizing agents initially, frameworks and formalizations, modeling and execution, inter-agent communication, and adaptive agents.

This book presents the proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Z Users, ZUM '95, held in Limerick, Ireland in September 1995.The book contains 34 carefully selected papers on Z, using Z, applications of Z, proof, testing, industrial usage, object orientation, animation of specification, method integration, and teaching formal methods. Of particular interest is the inclusion of an annotated Z bibliography listing 544 entries. While focussing on Z, by far the most commonly used "formal method" both in industry and application, the volume is of high relevance for the whole formal methods community.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Z Users, ZUM'97, held in Reading, UK, in April 1997.The volume presents 18 revised full papers together with three invited presentations by internationally leading experts. The papers are organized into topical sections on real-time systems, tools, logic, system development, reactive systems, refinement, and applications. Also a select Z bibliography by Jonathan Bowen is added. All in all, the book competently reports the state-of-the-art in research and advanced applications of the Z notation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference of Z Users, ZUM '98, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 1998. The 28 revised and invited papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book; also included is a comprehensive Z bibliography and a summary of the frequently asked questions at two Z Internet sites. The papers are organized in sections on industrial issues, concurrency, tools, Z and HOL, safety-critical and real-time systems, semantic theory, theory and standards, reasoning and consistency issues, refinement, and object orientation.

The second WRAC, NASA/IEEE Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts, was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, September 20–22, 2005. The workshop was sponsored by the Information Systems Division of NASA Goddard and IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Complexity in Computing and IEEE Task Force on Autonomous and Autonomic Systems. The workshop also received generous financial support from IBM, without which the workshop would not have been possible. Agent technology, along with autonomous and autonomic computing, has emerged as a major field in computing, and will greatly influence the future development of complex computer-based systems. The area of research is strongly influenced by the autonomic computing initiative as well as by developments in biologically inspired computing, and involves interdisciplinary interaction from those involved in research in social intelligence, psychology, arts, biology, computer science, computer communications and philosophy. This volume includes revised versions of papers presented at the workshop. The workshop was structured so as to allow adequate time for discussion and interaction, to exchange ideas and reflect on the motivations, scientific grounds and practical consequences of the concepts presented. Many of the ideas are truly “radical”, and so authors were given time to revise their papers to reflect further thoughts on the ideas presented and to reflect feedback received at the workshop. We are grateful to Jeff Kephart for a very interesting keynote speech describing IBM’s current and future work in this field, which fit very well with the aims and scope of the workshop.

This volume provides the reader with an introduction to system specification and design methods, with particular emphasis on structured and formal methods, method integration, concurrency and safety critical systems. It contains new material by Michael Hinchey and Jonathan Bowen, along with reprints of articles on high-integrity systems. Among these articles are contributions from Leslie Lamport, Nancy Leveson, and C.A.R. Hoare. The text provides details of specification and design approaches for this type of system, an overview of the development process, and evidence of how various classes of high integrity systems may be approached and developed successfully.