Formal Methods: Formal Techniques and Retrenchment

These days, the benefits of having a formal perspective in a development methodology are increasingly recognised. Up to now most formal approaches focus on some aspect of *compliance*, e.g., the compliance of an implementation to an abstraction (during development), or the compliance of an abstraction in reflecting suitable properties of a concrete model (during property checking). But many real world development activities involve changes to the system models used, that *go beyond* such compliance notions. Retrenchment seeks to bring a degree of rigour to such activities that are comparable to that achievable during compliance based activities. See http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/retrenchment for more details.

Interested individuals should contact Dr. Richard Banach ([Email Address Removed]) in the first instance.