Choosing a Formal Method

Choosing a formal method for a given purpose requires a good overview of the available methods, their underlying techniques, tool support and applications. We list here a collection of surveys and evaluation reports that may help in making this decision. Please, note that the opinions and conclusions drawn in these surveys do not necessarily reflect the opinion of FME and its members.

Two new survey papers offer complementary perspectives on the state of formal methods in 2020.

For future reference, we have collected and combined the bibliographies of the two papers into a single bibtex-file, which is available here.

Why Amazon Chose TLA+. Chris Newcombe. Abstract State Machines, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, and Z: 4th International Conference, ABZ 2014, Toulouse, France, June 2-6, 2014 Proceedings. LNCS, Vol 8477, pages 25-39, Springer, 2014.

Formal Methods for Safe and Secure Computer Systems. Hubert Garavel and Susanne Graf. BSI Study 875, Federal Office for Information Security, 2013. (PDF)

Formal Methods: Practice and Experience. Jim Woodcock, Peter Gorm Larsen, Juan Bicarregui, John Fitzgerald. ACM Computing Surveys, 41 (4), pages 19:1–19:36, ACM, 2009. (PDF)

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