Not so many years ago, it would have been difficult to find more than a handful of examples of the use of formal methods in industry. Today however, the industrial application of formal methods is becoming increasingly common in a variety of application areas, particularly those with a safety, security or financially critical aspects. Furthermore, in situations where a particularly high level of assurance is required, formal proof is broadly accepted as being of value. Perhaps the major benefit of formalisation is that it enables formal symbolic manip ulation of elements of a design and hence can provide developers with a variety of analyses which facilitate the detection of faults. Proof is just one of these possible formal activities, others, such as test case generation and animation, have also been shown to be effective bug finders. Proof can be used for both validation and verifi cation. Validation of a specification can be achieved by proving formal statements conjectured about the required behaviours of the system. Verification of the cor rectness of successive designs can be achieved by proof of a prescribed set of proof obligations generated from the specifications.

This volume provides an invaluable companion to Proof in VDM: A Practitioner's Guide. Using the proof theory presented in that volume, it examines a variety of realistic case studies which illustrate different aspects of the use of proof in formal development. Rather than concentrating on the construction of formal specifications (like most work in this area), it devotes two chapters to validation using proof, describing how proofs in VDM can be constructed via instantiations of the PVS and Isabelle theorem provers. Proof in VDM: Case Studies will provide invaluable reference material for practitioners of formal methods who need to construct proofs, students requiring a detailed introduction to the practicalities of proof, and researchers interested in the role of theorem proving in formal development and relevant tool support.

This festschrift volume constitutes a unique tribute to Zohar Manna on the occasion of his 64th birthday. Like the scientific work of Zohar Manna, the 32 research articles span the entire scope of the logical half of computer science. Also included is a paean to Zohar Manna by the volume editor. The articles presented are devoted to the theory of computing, program semantics, logics of programs, temporal logic, automated deduction, decision procedures, model checking, concurrent systems, reactive systems, hardware and software verification, testing, software engineering, requirements specification, and program synthesis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics, TPHOLs '97, held in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, in August 1997. The volume presents 19 carefully revised full papers selected from 32 submissions during a thorough reviewing process. The papers cover work related to all aspects of theorem proving in higher order logics, particularly based on secure mechanization of those logics; the theorem proving systems addressed include Coq, HOL, Isabelle, LEGO, and PVS.

On the Refinement Calculus gives one view of the development of the refinement calculus and its attempt to bring together - among other things - Z specifications and Dijkstra's programming language. It is an excellent source of reference material for all those seeking the background and mathematical underpinnings of the refinement calculus.

This year the SOFSEM conference is coming back to Milovy in Moravia to th be held for the 26 time. Although born as a local Czechoslovak event 25 years ago SOFSEM did not miss the opportunity oe red in 1989 by the newly found freedom in our part of Europe and has evolved into a full-?edged international conference. For all the changes, however, it has kept its generalist and mul- disciplinarycharacter.Thetracksofinvitedtalks,rangingfromTrendsinTheory to Software and Information Engineering, attest to this. Apart from the topics mentioned above, SOFSEM’99 oer s invited talks exploring core technologies, talks tracing the path from data to knowledge, and those describing a wide variety of applications. TherichcollectionofinvitedtalkspresentsonetraditionalfacetofSOFSEM: that of a winter school, in which IT researchers and professionals get an opp- tunity to see more of the large pasture of today’s computing than just their favourite grazing corner. To facilitate this purpose the prominent researchers delivering invited talks usually start with a broad overview of the state of the art in a wider area and then gradually focus on their particular subject.