Editorial

Abstract

Abstract. In June 1999, the first International Workshop on Integrated Formal Methods was held at York University in the UK. The primary aim of the workshop was the combination of behavioural and state-based formalisms to yield practical solutions to industrial problems. The workshop proceedings were edited by Keijiro Araki, Andy Galloway and Kenji Taguchi and are available as “IFM99” (ISBN 1-85233-107-0, published by Springer). After the workshop, selected authors were invited to develop journal versions of their papers, incorporating further extensions, corrections and revisions. This was arranged by Andy Galloway who then passed the papers to the journal for refereeing. And here we must record our sincere thanks to Andy. Without his efforts this issue of the journal would simply not have been possible. Following reports from referees and senior colleagues from the editorial board (and the withdrawal of one submission for publication in a book) five papers were accepted for publication here. We hope that those rejected will be further revised and resubmitted; they contained good work but required further development. The common theme is, predictably, the marrying of component specification with control of the interconnecting system, and the first 4 papers all present variations on the theme of Z + CSP. Sühl adds an additional structuring mechanism to Z and CSP and targets his application area as real-time embedded systems, whereas Derrick and Boiten use Object-Z to give partial specifications (viewpoints) which are then combined using CSP. Smith and Hayes describe Real-time Object-Z, which results from the integration of Object-Z with timed traces, and Mahony and Dong investigate the necessary formal underpinning required to combine Timed CSP and Object-Z by means of a trace model. The final paper, by Große-Rhode, introduces and illustrates a mechanism for checking the compatibility of different partial specifications and for coping with composite specifications in which different formalisms have been used. Whether or not this area of formal methods research merely allows us to integrate different, more ‘appropriate’, specification languages or gives rise to new hybrid languages remains to be seen. What is certain is that there are still many problems to be tackled and technology to be transferred.