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| | Formal methods - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
 | | Formal methods are particularly effective early in development at the requirements and specification levels, but can be used for a completely formal development of an implementation (e.g., a program). | | | In computer science, formal methods refers to mathematically based techniques for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems (Foldoc:formalmethods). | | | If the formal specification is in an axiomatic semantics, the preconditions and postconditions of the specification may become assertions in the executable code. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
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| | Formal Specification |
| | A formal specification is a mathematical notation used to describe a system, among other things, unambiguously and minimally. | | | There is a significant cost required in developing formal specifications because of the complexity, and the lack of experienced people who are familiar with formal languages. | | | I was pleasently surprised to recall that I had been exposed to formal specifications in a second year computer science course at my previous school. |
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http://sern.ucalgary.ca/~bowen/611/formalSpecification.htm
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| | SENG 611 - Formal Specification Summary |
| | Formal specification is a way of representing requirements using mathematical notation. | | | The main reason formal specifications are not used in all software projects is cost. | | | Since formal specifications are so precise there are only so many designs and implementations that will match these specifications. |
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http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~lancet/SENG/611/formal.html
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| | Chapter 4 Web book - Formal Verification |
| | Formal specification is a specification expressed in a language whose vocabulary, syntax, and semantics are formally defined, and which has a mathematical basis. | | | Often specifications depend on the semantics/meanings of words to convey the understanding to the system to be developed. | | | FSM(Finite state machine) is a model oriented, sequential method for functional specification consisting of a set states, a set of inputs, a transition function which specifies the next state given the current state and input, an output function which specifies actions associated with transitions, the initial state, and the final state. |
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http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~hankley/d841/Fa99/chap4.html
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| | Formal Specification of an Active Networks Programming Language |
| | On the other hand, the formal specification is intuitive, easy to understand and can serve as a useful guide for application programmers and language implementors. | | | The formal specification is executable and therefore provides an execution environment of PLAN programs. | | | Our contribution is a specification of PLAN, and in fact of a more general language, using rewriting logic as a formal specification language. |
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http://www-formal.stanford.edu/clt/plan.html
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| | Formal Specification Languages |
| | Probably the most widely known model oriented specification languages are VDM-SL, the specification language associated with VDM, the Vienna Development Method, and the Z specification language. | | | Two examples of such hybrid notations are RSL the specification language associated with the RAISE development methods, and LOTOS, a specification notation intended originally for the specification of communication protocols. | | | In a sense any formal specification can be thought of as providing a mathematical model of a system so it may be helpful to expand on this. |
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http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/cs/csfm02.htm
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| | Formal Specification |
| | Formal specifications need to be fully integrated with other software products and processes all along the software lifecycle. | | | Specification techniques should move from functional design to requirements engineering; higher-level, problem-oriented ontologies must therefore be supported instead of program-oriented ones. | | | Formal specification technology needs to provide CONSTRUCTIVE methods for specification development, analysis, and evolution. |
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http://www.softwaresystems.org/specification.html
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| | RFC 904 (rfc904) - Exterior Gateway Protocol formal specification |
| | Introduction This document is a formal specification of the Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP), which is used to exchange net-reachability information between Internet gateways belonging to the same or different autonomous systems. | | | Specifically excluded in this document is discussion on the background, application and limitations of EGP, which have been discussed elsewhere (RFC-827, RFC-888). | | | Besides being useful in the design and verification of the protocol, the table is useful for implementation and testing. |
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http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc904.html
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| | Tutorial on Formal Methods |
| | Formal methods are an important adjunct to reduce ambiguity and inconsistency, verify complex algorithms, and increase automation. | | | CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) is another formalization particularly good at modeling distributed systems and parallel computations. | | | Students learn a formal logic, how to formally specify software, and how to derive programs from these specifications. |
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http://hissa.ncsl.nist.gov/~black/formaltut.html
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| | Formal Methods Links |
| | ZETA is an open environment for the development of specification documents based on Z. It provides an integration framework for tools to edit, analyse and animate Z specifications and formalisms which are mapped to Z. It was developed in course of the research project ESPRESS and is available under a GPL license. | | | The ITiCSE Working Group on Teaching and Learning Formal Methods with Software is producing (by Dec 2000) a report on the support that is available in the area of formal methods education, and to provide guidelines for educators who are coming to teaching formal methods for the first time. | | | The Open Fundamental Software Technology Project in Japan were working on an architecture for automated test generation from formal specifications, but the web site has not been updated since 1995. |
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http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku/formalmethods.html
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| | Formal methods in interface specification |
| | The need to relate formal models of users' task knowledge to some model of the interface software, leads to research in interactor models of user interface software. | | | Grammars for textual interfaces (e.g., command line interfaces) are fairly common, formalized grammars (e.g., a set of linguistic rules for the formulation of command syntax) for textual interfaces are somewhat less common; formalized grammars for GUIs are fairly rare...as are formal languages for user interface specification. | | | These techniques are more or less formal methods by definition, and they are quite often applied to user interface specification tasks. |
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http://www.otal.umd.edu/guse/formal.html
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| | Extended ML |
| | Formal program development in Extended ML for the working programmer. | | | Algebraic methods for specification and formal development of programs. | | | Ben Kleinman worked on an environment for formal development of terminating SML programs in EML, building on the EML Kit, a prototype proof obligation generator by Paul Varnish, and the PVS theorem prover, but Ben moved on and that work has been abandoned. |
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http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dts/eml
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| | Active Nets Arpa project summary |
| | Maude has a rigorous formal semantics in rewriting logic for its distributed object-oriented and reflective features, and excellent capabilities for the formal executable specification and analysis of active networks. | | | Denker, Talcott and Meseguer have developed a new general formal modelling methodology for security protocols in which agents and attackers are specified as concurrent objects communicating through messages. | | | They have illustrated this methodology by developing an executable formal specification of the Needham-Schroeder cryptographic protocol and of a very general attacker, and using Maude-based formal analysis techniques they have exhibited an attack violating the protocol's security requirements. |
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http://www-formal.stanford.edu/clt/ArpaActive/summary.html
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| | JOT: Journal of Object Technology - BON-CASE: An Extensible CASE Tool for Formal Specification and Reasoning |
| | BON has been designed from the start to support formal specification techniques, which have proven to be useful, if not essential, in designing such systems. | | | Each class in BON may contain a specification, detailing the attributes, queries, and commands possessed by the class, as well as assertions (e.g., pre- and postconditions and class invariants). | | | A semantics-preserving translation may be definable on a subset of a language (as is the case with mapping BON to JML). |
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http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2002_08/article5
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| | RSP&A formal methods resources |
| | Because the specification is created using mathematical notation, it is inherently less ambiguous that informal modes of representation. | | | Bowan, J., Formal Specification and Documentation using Z: A Case Study Approach, International Thomson Computer Press, 1996. | | | Sheppard, D., An Introduction to Formal Specification with Z and VDM, McGraw-Hill, 1995. |
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http://www.rspa.com/spi/formal-methods.html
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| | Formal Methods Virtual Library |
| | Formal methods are a fault avoidance technique that help in the reduction of errors introduced into a system, particularly at the earlier stages of design. | | | VIS (Verification Interacting with Synthesis), a system for formal verification, synthesis, and simulation of finite state systems, especially logic circuits. | | | SMV (Symbolic Model Verifier) model checker for finite-state systems, using the specification language CTL (Computation Tree Logic), a propositional branching-time temporal logic. |
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http://vl.fmnet.info
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| | Formal Specification and Verification of ARM6 |
| | The aim of this research is to develop full-scale executable specifications of an industrial strength microprocessor at both the instruction and architectural levels and to use formal verification to establish equivalence or refinement relationships between parts of these specifications. | | | Amongst the formal challenges for the instruction set semantics will be the verification of desired properties of short sequences of instructions, a la Boyer and Yu [7]. | | | Members have worked on a wide variety of formal specification and verification problems ranging from low level hardware modelling to the analysis of mixed hardware software systems. |
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http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mjcg/ARM/project.html
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| | References |
| | QUAL is a many-sorted query algebra defined as a query formalism for the structural part of the OBLOG object model. | | | A formal language should be used to avoid ambiguity in design documents. | | | Then temporal class specification is explained, i.e., the use of linear-time temporal logic for in-the-small specification of object classes. |
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http://www.ifis.cs.tu-bs.de/html_e/profile/node16.html
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| | The World Wide Web Virtual Library: The Z notation |
| | Z is a formal (i.e., mathematical) specification notation used by industry (especially in high-integraity systems) as part of the software (and hardware) development process in both Europe and the US. | | | Cogito - methodology and toolset for the formal development of software. | | | VDM (Vienna Development Method) is a method which uses a specification notation that is similar to Z. See Understanding the differences between VDM and Z. |
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http://vl.zuser.org
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| | Comp.software-eng FAQ (Part 3): readings |
| | "Formal Specification and Software Development", Prentice-Hall International Series in Computer Science, 1980. | | | "Formal Software Development Methods, VDM'91", LNCS 551 and 552, Springer-Verlag. | | | Uses the authors' specification language (Spec) to develop a project in Ada. |
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http://www.faqs.org/faqs/software-eng/part3
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| | NASA LaRC Formal Methods Program: What Is Formal Methods? |
| | "Formal Methods" refers to mathematically rigorous techniques and tools for the specification, design and verification of software and hardware systems. | | | For example a theorem prover might be best used to analyze the correctness of a RTL level desription of a Fast Fourier Transform circuit, whereas algebraic derivational methods might best be used to analyze the correctness of the design refinements into a gate-level design. | | | From Formal Models to Formally Based Methods: An Industrial Experience (Ciapessoni), ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Jan. 1999. |
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http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/fm-what.html
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| | Formal Specification |
| | A formal specification is a minimal description of a system in a mathematical notation | | | No one wants to read pure formal specs -- formal specs should always be interspersed with natural language (e.g. | | | Solution: don't formally specify everything, just the subsystems you need to (hard, complex, or critical) |
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http://sern.ucalgary.ca/courses/cpsc/451/W03/FormalSpecs.html
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| | J.M. Wing Publications |
| | J.M. Wing, “Weaving Formal Methods into the Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum,” in the Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software 2000, Iowa City, IA, May 2000, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1816, Springer-Verlag, pp. 2-7. | | | J.M. Wing, “Specifications in Software Development,” Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, June, 1992. | | | J.M. Wing and A.M. Zaremski, “Unintrusive Ways to Integrate Formal Specifications in Practice,” Proceedings VDM '91, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 551, Springer-Verlag, October 1991, Delft, The Netherlands, pp. 545-569. Also CMU-91-113, February 1991. |
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http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/index.html
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| | Formal Specifications |
| | A formal specification is a minimal description of a system in a mathematical notation. | | | An example of a formal specification language is Z. | | | They support the specification of systems by constructing of a mathematical model of the system. |
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http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~jadalow/seng611/formalspecs.html
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| | Learn more about Program specification in the online encyclopedia. |
| | A program specification is the definition of what a computer program is expected to do. | | | It can be informal, in which case it can be considered as a blueprint or user manual from a developer point of view, or formal, in which case it has a definite meaning defined in mathematical or programmatic terms. | | | Enter a phrase or search word in the box below. |
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http://www.onlineencyclopedia.org/p/pr/program_specification.html
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| | Formal Specification Languages |
| | Formal specification language are designed for formality, but not for execution. | | | The result is that during application development the conceptual model and the design model remain in step. | | | This avoids many of the pitfalls which await developers working on applications whose specifications are changing even during application development! |
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http://www.icparc.ic.ac.uk/eclipse/reports/eclipse/node5.html
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| | Unified Modeling Language |
| | OMG is currently upgrading all of UML to Version 2.0. | | | Until all of the parts of the UML 2.0 specification become formal specifications, you can refer to the following documents that comprise these parts of the UML 2.0 specification. | | | OMG is pleased to announce that the UML specification (version 1.4.2, OMG document: formal/05-04-01) is now an accepted ISO specification. |
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http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/uml.htm
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| | Formal verification -- Facts, Info, and Encyclopedia article |
| | System types that are considered in the literature for formal verification | | | using (Click link for more info and facts about formal methods) formal methods. | | | with respect to a certain formal specification or property, |
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http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/f/fo/formal_verification.htm
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