Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering.
Refinement is the process of developing a more detailed design or implementation from an abstract specification through a sequence of mathematically-based steps that maintain correctness with respect to the original specification.
The aim of this BCS FACS refinement workshop is to bring together people who are interested in the development of more concrete designs or executable programs from abstract specifications using formal notations, tool support for formal software development, and practical experience with formal refinement methodologies.
The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of common ground and key differences. Questions we might centre discussions around include:
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Two types of contribution are elicited: tutorial or survey papers in addition to technical contributions.
Submissions will be reviewed for relevance to the workshop, and informal proceedings will be available at the workshop to participants.
We will also be producing a special issue of the journal Formal Aspects of Computing devoted to this workshop. This will consist of a selection of papers from the workshop which would be refereed in the usual fashion prior to acceptance by the journal.
The Refinement workshop will take place on July 20nd and 21st, and is one of a number of workshops run by FLoC prior to a number of conferences, including Formal Methods Europe which takes place during the period 22nd-24th of July.
Papers should be submitted in Postscript or PDF format by e-mail to reach John Derrick <jd1@ukc.ac.uk> by 1st April, 2002.
This workshop continues a long tradition in refinement workshops run under the auspices of the British Computer Society (BCS) FACS special interest group. Running since 1988, previous refinement workshops have been held at Cambridge, London, Bath etc.
In 1998 the BCS refinement workshop was combined with the Australasian Refinement Workshop to form the International Refinement Workshop, hosted at alongside Formal Methods Pacific 1998 at The Australian National University.
Workshop Webpage with more detailed information: