The development and deployment of formal methods in the UK

UK researchers have made major contributions to the technical ideas underpinning formal approaches to the specification and development of computer systems. Perhaps as a consequence of this, some of the significant attempts to deploy theoretical ideas into practical environments have taken place in the UK. The authors of this paper have been involved in formal methods for many years and both have tracked a significant proportion of the whole story. This paper both lists key ideas and indicates where attempts were made to use the ideas in practice. Not all of these deployment stories have been a complete success and an attempt is made to tease out lessons that influence the probability of long-term impact.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

A formal approach to determining parallel resource bindings

The paper investigates the nature of the design process for parallel operating systems. It proposes a temporal logic-based formal methodology addressing the high-level design of such systems. In operating systems design, much use is made of the informal notion of resource bindings. A way of improving the high-level design of parallel systems is proposed by providing a formal language for enumerating the design space and thus enabling all high-level design alternatives to be represented. A design process to be used with this language is given, the aim being to establish the most appropriate binding. The process is temporal logic-based and permits high level design of parallel systems to be analysed, tested and, in certain cases, formally verified before implementation is embarked upo

Are there new models of computation? Reply to Wegner and Eberbach

Wegner and Eberbach[Weg04b] have argued that there are fundamental limitations to Turing Machines as a foundation of computability and that these can be overcome by so-called superTuring models such as interaction machines, the [pi]calculus and the $-calculus. In this paper we contest Weger and Eberbach claims

The Viking rocket: A memoir

The development and testing of the Viking rocket series is reviewed. These twelve sounding rockets were launched from 1949 to 1954