New Opportunities for Integrated Formal Methods

Formal methods have provided approaches for investigating software engineering fundamentals and also have high potential to improve current practices in dependability assurance. In this article, we summarise known strengths and weaknesses of formal methods. From the perspective of the assurance of robots and autonomous systems~(RAS), we highlight new opportunities for integrated formal methods and identify threats to their adoption to be mitigated. Based on these opportunities and threats, we develop an agenda for fundamental and empirical research on integrated formal methods and for successful transfer of validated research to RAS assurance. Furthermore, we outline our expectations on useful outcomes of such an agenda

A More Complete Model of Communicating Processes

AbstractA previous paper by Hoare gives axioms and proof rules for communicating processes that provide a calculus of total correctness. This paper gives explicit definitions of communicating processes as predicates. The former axioms and proof rules become theorems, proved using the explicit definitions. The defining predicates are more powerful than the proof rules for reasoning about processes, but less often useful for their construction. An implementation of the processes using partial recursive functions is given