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Institutt for informatikk seminar: Thursday 21 March, kl. 14:15

What is refinement?

Gunnar Schroeter

Technical University, Berlin

Refinement relations are defined for many different specification techniques (like Z and LOTOS) and for different semantical frameworks (like data refinement for data types).

Some times different refinement relations are defined even for the same specification technic. Later the more general concept of formal development relations was introduced which embraces refinement as a special sub-case.

This talk addresses the question 'What is the common idea behind these different kinds of formal developments and refinements respectively?'.

To attack this problem we will propose an abstract formal framework containing a definition of abstract formal developments which is inspired by the idea of preserving properties and which covers all the different kinds of formal developments and refinements.

The abstract concepts will be illustrated by formal developments for data types (especially data refinement, forward-simulation and backward-simulation, but also some new kinds of formal developments).

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