Overture Tool

Formal Modelling in VDM

Overture Tool

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Net Meeting 16

   
Date 4 March 2007, 1200 CET
Participants John Fitzgerald, Peter Gorm Larsen, Hugo Macedo, Shin Sahara, Marcel Verhoef

Review of Action List

The actions are all at Overture on SourceForge.

VDMTools

Status of VDMTools development
The proof obligation generator spec to take the new VICE extensions into account was updated by Peter. Shin will make bug reports of it at the end of March.
Bug reporting for VDMTools bugs
A URL is being set up for bug reports and Shin will report on how to access and use it.

Overture

Status of Thomas’ work on the Overture type checker
Thomas is almost finished with his work but he needs to concentrate on his thesis writing at the moment. He has not dealt with operations, inheritance and instance variables and probably he will not get time to do that. His focus has been on investigation whether it is possible to do type derivation in the same way as for ML for polymorphic functions and typeless functions. This is not a problem for the other work on the tools.
Status of Hugo’s work on the Overture interpreter
Hugo sent a short report on the actual achievements on the Overture Interpreter which are the confirmation of the feasibility of the ideas that precede his project. One idea is to translate the OML classes to byte code and use JVM to debug; the alternative is to specify our own Virtual Machine refactoring and reusing some actual specifications. The second approach is being studied. Further feedback on the vital decision between JVM or the internal approach will be given off line by Marcel.
Status of Sander’s work on the Overture proof support
Sander was travelling, so John reported. We can generate and prove a PO from the simplest case study and are making progress at generating theories and tactics sufficient to deal with more complex ones. The hardest are those with an existential quantifier because of the need to generate a witness value. The various improvements that have taken place between HOL98 and HOL4 are making some aspects of the project simpler than we expected.
Sander’s visit to Ncl took place last week and was well timed. Cliff and John are investigating characterizations of LPF and they had a visit from Jim Woodcock on the same subject. So there was a chance for Sander to see something of the longer-term research issues as well as working on the shorter-term goals of updating Prosper.
Mondex and Pacemaker case studies
Jeremy Bryans reported that several people have expressed interest in tackling Mondex in VDM, and that he is leading this work from Newcastle. A workshop is scheduled for 2-3 April at Newcastle for the interested people to make concrete progress. Prior to that, a reading group at Newcastle will review the monograph that describes the Mondex study in Z.
John reported that the Newcastle team is using this as an opportunity to learn VDM++ as they go, and this is doing a great deal widen the skills base for Overture.
There was some discussion of real time and stochastic extensions. Marcel reported very good results introducing an element of stochastic modeling into the RT extensions that he has been working on for the final chapter of his PhD.

Publication plans

In preparation:

In review:

In press:

Any Other Business

Nothing to report.

Next Meeting

8 Apr 2007 1200 CET