Proceedings 18th Refinement Workshop
This is an incremental workshop report on formal methods for software engineering, relevant to researchers and practitioners in safety-critical domains.
The paper discusses the 18th Refinement Workshop, which focused on refinement as a formal method for developing detailed designs from abstract specifications in software engineering, with applications in security and safety-critical industries.
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. Work on the foundations of languages such as Z, B, VDM and CSP have led to their widespread use in certain industrial sectors, e.g., those with security or safety critical concerns. In addition to precise specification, formal methods also allow the possibility of precise and verifiable development, as captured by the concept of refinement. The 18th Refinement Workshop was held as part of FLoC 2018 at Oxford, UK.