English

The Unit-B Method -- Refinement Guided by Progress Concerns

Software Engineering 2020-04-01 v2 Logic in Computer Science Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

We present Unit-B, a formal method inspired by Event-B and UNITY. Unit-B aims at the stepwise design of software systems satisfying safety and liveness properties. The method features the novel notion of coarse and fine schedules, a generalisation of weak and strong fairness for specifying events' scheduling assumptions. Based on events schedules, we propose proof rules to reason about progress properties and a refinement order preserving both liveness and safety properties. We illustrate our approach by an example to show that systems development can be driven by not only safety but also liveness requirements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.10143,
  title  = {The Unit-B Method -- Refinement Guided by Progress Concerns},
  author = {Simon Hudon and Thai Son Hoang and Jonathan S. Ostroff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.10143},
  year   = {2020}
}