Jim Woodcock

Marie-Claude Gaudel

James Woodcock

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the Third International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, FME '96, held in Oxford, UK, in March 1996. FME '96 was co-sponsored by IFIP WG 14.3 and devoted to "the application and demonstrated industrial benefit of formal methods, their new horizons and strengthened foundations". The 35 full revised papers included were selected from a total of 103 submissions; also included are three invited papers. The book addresses all relevant aspects of formal methods, from the point of view of the industrial R & D professional as well as from the academic viewpoint, and impressively documents the significant progress in the use of formal methods for the solution of real-world problems.

Third International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe Co-Sponsored by IFIP WG 14.3, Oxford, UK, March 18 - 22, 1996. Proceedings.

FME '96: Industrial Benefit and Advances in Formal Methods

Bertrand Meyer

A Step Towards Verified Software Worries about the reliability of software are as old as software itself; techniques for allaying these worries predate even James King’s 1969 thesis on “A program verifier. ” What gives the whole topic a new urgency is the conjunction of three phenomena: the blitz-like spread of software-rich systems to control ever more facets of our world and our lives; our growing impatience with deficiencies; and the development—proceeding more slowly, alas, than the other two trends—of techniques to ensure and verify software quality. In 2002 Tony Hoare, one of the most distinguished contributors to these advances over the past four decades, came to the conclusion that piecemeal efforts are no longer sufficient and proposed a “Grand Challenge” intended to achieve, over 15 years, the production of a verifying compiler: a tool that while processing programs would also guarantee their adherence to specified properties of correctness, robustness, safety, security and other desirable properties. As Hoare sees it, this endeavor is not a mere research project, as might normally be carried out by one team or a small consortium of teams, but a momentous endeavor, comparable in its scope to the successful mission to send a man to the moon or to the sequencing of the human genome.

James Woodcock

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