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Nowadays, formal methods are used in various areas for the verification of programs or for code generation from models in order to increase the quality of software and to reduce costs. However, there are still fields in which formal methods…
Ensuring and validating the safe operation of automated vehicles are key challenges for their market launch. Scenario-based development and test approaches are currently being pursued as possible solutions. An essential prerequisite for…
Virtually all verification techniques using formal methods rely on the availability of a formal specification, which describes the design requirements precisely. However, formulating specifications remains a manual task that is notoriously…
The study of variability in software development has become increasingly important in recent years. A common mechanism to represent the variability in a product line is by means of feature models. However, the relationship between these…
More and more works are done on the design of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) which is designed to help us for modeling effective object oriented software, Existing Object-Oriented design methods are not mature enough to capture…
Multiple logic-based reconstructions of conceptual data modelling languages such as EER, UML Class Diagrams, and ORM exist. They mainly cover various fragments of the languages and none are formalised such that the logic applies…
This paper presents a focused literature survey on the use of large language models (LLM) to assist in writing formal specifications for software. A summary of thirty-five key papers is presented, including examples for specifying programs…
Formally verifying properties of software code has been a highly desirable task, especially with the emergence of LLM-generated code. In the same vein, they provide an interesting avenue for the exploration of formal verification and…
Stepwise refinement of algebraic specifications is a well known formal methodology for program development. However, traditional notions of refinement based on signature morphisms are often too rigid to capture a number of relevant…
We provide a novel notion of what it means to be interpretable, looking past the usual association with human understanding. Our key insight is that interpretability is not an absolute concept and so we define it relative to a target model,…
We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural…
The Unified Modeling Language is a standardized visual language widely used for modeling and documenting the design of software systems. Although many tools generate UML diagrams from UML code, generating executable UML code from…
Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
The use of lightweight formal methods (LFM) for the development of industrial applications has become a major trend. Although the term "lightweight formal methods" has been used for over ten years now, there seems to be no common agreement…
Fully automated verification of large-scale software and hardware systems is arguably the holy grail of formal methods. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential for enhancing the degree of automation in formal…
A conceptual model can be used to manage complexity in both the design and implementation phases of the system development life cycle. Such a model requires a firm grasp of the abstract principles on which a system is based, as well as an…
Because of the speed, flexibility, and efficiency that it offers, the Internet has become the means for conducting growing numbers of transactions between suppliers and large international corporations. In this way, the Internet has opened…
Large Language Models demonstrate substantial promise for advancing scientific discovery, yet their deployment in disciplines demanding factual precision and specialized domain constraints presents significant challenges. Within molecular…
Formal methods provide remarkable tools allowing for high levels of confidence in the correctness of developments. Their use is therefore encouraged, when not required, for the development of systems in which safety or security is…
The generation of texts using Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently uncertain, with sources of uncertainty being not only the generation of texts, but also the prompt used and the downstream interpretation. Within this work, we provide…