A bibliography on formal methods for system specification, design and validation

Literature on the specification, design, verification, testing, and evaluation of avionics systems was surveyed, providing 655 citations. Journal papers, conference papers, and technical reports are included. Manual and computer-based methods were employed. Keywords used in the online search are listed

Formalizing Reusable Software Components

This paper has been accepted by the ITT Workshop on Reusability in Programming, Newport RI, September 7-9, 1983.There has been a long-standing desire in computer science for a way of collecting and using libraries of standard software components. Unfortunately, there has been only limited success in actually doing this. We believe that the lack of success stems not from any resistance to the idea, nor from any lack of trying, but rather from the difficulty of choosing an appropriate formalism for representing components. In this paper we define five desiderata for a good formalization of reusable software components and discuss many of the formalisms which have been used for representing components in light of these desiderata. We then briefly describe a formalism we are developing — the Plan Calculus — which seeks to satisfy these desiderata by combining together the best features of prior formalisms.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

On the engineering of crucial software

The various aspects of the conventional software development cycle are examined. This cycle was the basis of the augmented approach contained in the original grant proposal. This cycle was found inadequate for crucial software development, and the justification for this opinion is presented. Several possible enhancements to the conventional software cycle are discussed. Software fault tolerance, a possible enhancement of major importance, is discussed separately. Formal verification using mathematical proof is considered. Automatic programming is a radical alternative to the conventional cycle and is discussed. Recommendations for a comprehensive approach are presented, and various experiments which could be conducted in AIRLAB are described

View-based abstraction : enhancing maintainability and modularity in the presence of implementation dependencies

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-177).by Luis H. Rodriguez, Jr.Ph.D

Inspection Methods in Programming

The work reported here lies in the area of overlap between artificial intelligence software engineering. As research in artificial intelligence, it is a step towards a model of problem solving in the domain of programming. In particular, this work focuses on the routine aspects of programming which involve the application of previous experience with similar programs. I call this programming by inspection. Programming is viewed here as a kind of engineering activity. Analysis and synthesis by inspection area prominent part of expert problem solving in many other engineering disciplines, such as electrical and mechanical engineering. The notion of inspections methods in programming developed in this work is motivated by similar notions in other areas of engineering. This work is also motivated by current practical concerns in the area of software engineering. The inadequacy of current programming technology is universally recognized. Part of the solution to this problem will be to increase the level of automation in programming. I believe that the next major step in the evolution of more automated programming will be interactive systems which provide a mixture of partially automated program analysis, synthesis and verification. One such system being developed at MIT, called the programmer's apprentice, is the immediate intended application of this work. This report concentrates on the knowledge are of the programmer's apprentice, which is the form of a taxonomy of commonly used algorithms and data structures. To the extent that a programmer is able to construct and manipulate programs in terms of the forms in such a taxonomy, he may relieve himself of many details and generally raise the conceptual level of his interaction with the system, as compared with present day programming environments. Also, since it is practical to expand a great deal of effort pre-analyzing the entries in a library, the difficulty of verifying the correctness of programs constructed this way is correspondingly reduced. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated by the design of an initial library of common techniques for manipulating symbolic data. This document also reports on the further development of a formalism called the plan calculus for specifying computations in a programming language independent manner. This formalism combines both data and control abstraction in a uniform framework that has facilities for representing multiple points of view and side effects

Program development as a formal activity

SIGLEDEGerman