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Automatic Refinement Checking for B

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 3785))

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Abstract

Refinement is a key concept in the B-Method. While refinement is at the heart of the B Method, so far no automatic refinement checker has been developed for it. In this paper we present a refinement checking algorithm and implementation for B. It is based on using an operational semantics of B, obtained in practice by the ProB animator. The refinement checker has been integrated into ProB toolset and we present various case studies and empirical results in the paper, showing the algorithm to be surprisingly effective. The algorithm checks that a refinement preserves the trace properties of a specification. We also compare our tool against the refinement checker FDR for CSP and discuss an extension for singleton failure refinement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Michael Leuschel & Michael Butler

  2. Institut für Informatik, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, D-40225, Düsseldorf

    Michael Leuschel

Authors
  1. Michael Leuschel
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  2. Michael Butler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, M13 9PL, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Kung-Kiu Lau

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Richard Banach

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Leuschel, M., Butler, M. (2005). Automatic Refinement Checking for B. In: Lau, KK., Banach, R. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3785. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11576280_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11576280_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29797-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32250-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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