This is the first book aimed at people who already understand the basics of the Z notation and now wish to become users of it. Written in a clear manner, this practical book demonstrates how Z should be used to solve real problems. Key features: includes five large case studies and many smaller examples of using Z, each illustrating different features of the language; each specification includes detailed discussions of the models chosen, alternative approaches, and leads the reader through the thought processes of the specifier and contains a comprehensive glossary with links into examples in the main text that illustrate the definitions in use. Z in Practice is aimed at the practitioner wanting to find out about current practice of formal methods, and provides an excellent short guide for non-technical project managers and team leaders.

The study of Complex Systems is growing rapidly, and modelling and simulation tools are an important part of the process. This volume brings together work from a multidisciplinary group of scientists, from biology and computer science, who are studying a variety of techniques and applications for modelling and simulating complex systems. A common theme emerging from much of this work is an emphasis on validation: how one can have confidence that a computer simulation is saying something sensible about the complex real-world domain of interest.

This book describes CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation), a pattern-based approach to engineering trustworthy simulations that are both scientifically useful to the researcher and scientifically credible to third parties. This approach emphasises three key aspects to this development of a simulation as a scientific instrument: the use of explicit models to capture the scientific domain, the engineered simulation platform, and the experimental results of running simulations; the use of arguments to provide evidence that the scientific instrument is fit for purpose; and the close co-working of domain scientists and simulation software engineers. In Part I the authors provide a managerial overview: the rationale for and benefits of using the CoSMoS approach, and a small worked example to demonstrate it in action. Part II is a catalogue of the core patterns. Part III lists more specific “helper” patterns, showing possible routes to a simulation. Finally Part IV documents CellBranch, a substantial case study developed using the CoSMoS approach.

Illustrating a route for mathematically specifying and rigorously implementing a high assurance compiler suitable for use in developing high integrity applications, this book explains the various techniques used at each stage of the development.

The study of complex systems is growing rapidly and modelling and simulation tools are an important part of the process. This volume brings together work from a multidisciplinary group of scientists, who are studying a variety of techniques and applications for modelling and simulating complex systems. Building on the success of the 2008 and 2009 CoSMoS workshops, the work presented covers subjects ranging from philosophy, scientific validity, and the modelling and simulation of biological and socio-technical systems.

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media. The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

This Festschrift is a tribute to Susan Stepneys ideas and achievements in the areas of computer science, formal specifications and proofs, complex systems, unconventional computing, artificial chemistry, and artificial life. All chapters were written by internationally recognised leaders in computer science, physics, mathematics, and engineering. The book shares fascinating ideas, algorithms and implementations related to the formal specification of programming languages and applications, behavioural inheritance, modelling and analysis of complex systems, parallel computing and non-universality, growing cities, artificial life, evolving artificial neural networks, and unconventional computing. Accordingly, it offers an insightful and enjoyable work for readers from all walks of life, from undergraduate students to university professors, from mathematicians, computers scientists and engineers to physicists, chemists and biologists.

This collection of papers draws together a variety of approaches for adding ob ject orientation to the Z formal specification language. These papers are not a conference proceedings, but have a slightly more complicated his tory. This work has grown and evolved from some work originally done in the ZIP project, under the United Kingdom's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) IED initiative. ZIP is a three year project which aims to make the use of the Z specification language more widespread. It hopes to achieve this by producing a standard for Zj developing a method for Zj building tool support for Zj and carrying out research into refinement, proof and concurrency in Z. The ZIP methods work includes performing a survey of current Z practitioners (reported in [Barden et al. 1992])j investigating current styles and methods of Z usagej and developing a Z Method handbook (available early in 1993). As part of this work, we carried out a comparative study of the ways in which object orientation has been combined with Z. A summary of that work has been published as [Stepney et al. 1992].