Synopses & Reviews
This volume provides an invaluable companion to Proof in VDM: A Practitioner's Guide. Using the proof theory presented in that volume, it examines a variety of realistic case studies which illustrate different aspects of the use of proof in formal development. Rather than concentrating on the construction of formal specifications (like most work in this area), it devotes two chapters to validation using proof, describing how proofs in VDM can be constructed via instantiations of the PVS and Isabelle theorem provers. Proof in VDM: Case Studies will provide invaluable reference material for practitioners of formal methods who need to construct proofs, students requiring a detailed introduction to the practicalities of proof, and researchers interested in the role of theorem proving in formal development and relevant tool support.
Synopsis
Not so many years ago, it would have been difficult to find more than a handful of examples of the use of formal methods in industry. Today however, the industrial application of formal methods is becoming increasingly common in a variety of application areas, particularly those with a safety, security or financially critical aspects. Furthermore, in situations where a particularly high level of assurance is required, formal proof is broadly accepted as being of value. Perhaps the major benefit of formalisation is that it enables formal symbolic manip- ulation of elements of a design and hence can provide developers with a variety of analyses which facilitate the detection of faults. Proof is just one of these possible formal activities, others, such as test case generation and animation, have also been shown to be effective bug finders. Proof can be used for both validation and verifi- cation. Validation of a specification can be achieved by proving formal statements conjectured about the required behaviours of the system. Verification of the cor- rectness of successive designs can be achieved by proof of a prescribed set of proof obligations generated from the specifications.
Table of Contents
Introduction.- A Tracking System.- The Ammunition Control System.- A Network Security Model.- An EXPRESS to SQL Compiler.- Shared Memory Synchronization.- VDM Proofs in PVS.- Index.