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A History of Formal Methods in Railways (ormal Aspects of Computing's special issue on the History of Formal Methods)

  Paper to appear in Formal Aspects of Computing's special issue on the History of Formal Methods: Maurice Ter Beek , Alessandro Fantechi, Alessio Ferrari , Stefania Gnesi , Anne Elisabeth Haxthausen , thierry lecomte : A History of Formal Methods in Railways https://lnkd.in/eeUSBTg6 Abstract. The engineering of industrial systems, particularly in safety-critical domains such as railways, demands rigorous verification and validation processes to ensure system dependability. Formal methods have emerged as powerful tools to complement traditional software engineering practices. In the railway sector, which increasingly relies on complex, distributed, and cyber-physical control systems, formal methods have demonstrated particular value for many decades now. In this paper, we provide a retrospective overview of the application of formal methods and tools in the railway domain, with emphasis on two prominent verification approaches and one frequently verified railway system: modelin...
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J.-R. Abrial, Foreword of the book "SPECIFICATION CASE STUDIEs" edited by Ian Hayes

 Foreword of the book "SPECIFICATION CASE STUDIEs" edited by Ian Hayes Reading formal texts is like meeting people. Sometimes, you understand them straightaway like good friends who take to each other immediately. At other times, it is more difficult. You may parse what you read, but find it impossible to work out any meaning. With the latter, you have to be patient, ask questions, explore the surroundings; in other words, it is better for you to be introduced through some common good friends who volunteer to help you prepare for the first meeting. Large computer programs, to say the least, pertain to the category of formal texts whose meanings are not immediately obvious! For that reason, people have been trying – for some time – to find out what kind of intermediate text would be best suited to play the role of go-between. This book reports on experiments made at Oxford University within this frame- work: it shows how one may communicate ideas and meanings about existing (o...
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SPECIFICATION CASE STUDIES, Edited by Ian Hayes

    https://staff.itee.uq.edu.au/ianh/Papers/SCS2.pdf SPECIFICATION CASE STUDIES Second Edition Copyright c© 1987, 1992 Prentice Hall International (UK) Ltd Appendices A and B may be copied for educational purposes. Edited by Ian Hayes With Contributions by Bill Flinn Roger Gimson Steve King Carroll Morgan Ib Holm Sørensen Bernard Sufrin ii Contents I Tutorials 1 1 Small examples of specification using mathematics 3 Ian Hayes 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 A symbol table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 File update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.4 Sorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.5 Solutions to exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2 Block-structured symbol table 13 Ian Hayes 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.2 Sy...
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" Specification Models " Ian J. Hayes

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"Extending B without Changing It (for Developing Distributed Systems),” J.-R. Abrial, 1st Conference on the B method

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The 20th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering July 4 - 6, 2026, Shanghai, China

  https://tase2026.github.io/c_cs.html With a celebration of JRA, including a 15-minute talk by Jonathan Bowen 17:00-18:00 Gedenkschrift for Jean-Raymond Abrial
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Why might we teach "Formal Methods" informally? And to whom? And when? Carroll Morgan

 BCS-FACS Online SeminarDate and time Thursday 25 June, 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Location Online Free registration < https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2026/june/hybrid-why-might-we-teach-formal-methods-informally-and-to-whom-and-when/ > Note that this event is online only. Timetable 11:00 am - Talk 12:00 pm - Questions and answers 1:00 pm - Event closes Seminar Details Title: Why might we teach "Formal Methods" informally? And to whom? And when? Speaker: Carroll Morgan Abstract: Formal Methods (for computing) was enabled by Hoare's “An axiomatic basis for computer programming” in 1969, where Formal meant “in the sense of formal logic”, i.e. reasoning based on manipulation of symbols which themselves had no intrinsic meaning (in the sense of Hilbert). Hoare's paper had itself been enabled by Floyd's “Assigning meanings to programs” just two years earlier, whose informal message might well have been -- in retrospect at least -- “Don...
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