The BCS-FACS Refinement Workshop has been running since 1988: in the UK for the first seven editions; as part of the International Refinement Workshop in Canberra in 1998; and then in Copenhagen in 2002, Surrey in 2005, Macao in 2006, and Oxford in 2007.
The 13th edition was held in Turku, Finland, in May 2008, co-located with FM 2008. There were 15 contributed papers, covering a wide range of topics in the theory and application of refinement.
The invited speaker, Wim Hesselink, was sponsored by Formal Methods Europe.
His talk on simulation refinement for concurrency verification was very well received. Technical sessions covered ASM refinement, Algebraic methods, State-based concurrent systems and State-based systems.
Papers are being reviewed and revised for a special issue of the journal Science of Computer Programming based on developments and extensions of Refine 2008 workshop papers.
Eerke Boiten
John Derrick
Gerhard Schellhorn