Refinement is the term used to describe systematic and formal methods of
specifying hard- and software and transforming the specifications into
designs and implementations. The value of formal methods in producing
reliable hard- and software is widely appreciated by academics and
workers in industry, despite the fact that certain research areas, such
as the application to industrial-scale problems, are still in their
infancy. This volume contains the papers presented at the 5th Refinement
Workshop held in London, 8-10 January 1992. Its theme was the theory and
practice of software specifications, which is the transformation of
formal software specifications into more correct specifications, designs
and codes. This has been an important area of research for the last 5
years and the workshop addressed specific issues and problems related to
it. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: the role of
refinement in software development, parallel designs and
implementations, methods and tools for verification of critical
properties, refinement and confidentiality, concurrent processes as
objects, the compliance of Ada programs with Z specifications and a
tactic driven refinement tool. This is the latest refinement workshop
proceedings to be published in the Workshops in Computing series (the
3rd and 4th workshops having appeared in 1990 and 1991 respectively). It
will be of interest to academic and industrial researchers, postgraduate
students and research-oriented developers in the computer industry.
