Building Specifications in the Event-B Institution

Abstract

This paper describes a formal semantics for the Event-B specification language using the theory of institutions. We define an institution for Event-B, EVT, and prove that it meets the validity requirements for satisfaction preservation and model amalgamation. We also present a series of functions that show how the constructs of the Event-B specification language can be mapped into our institution. Our semantics sheds new light on the structure of the Event-B language, allowing us to clearly delineate three constituent sub-languages: the superstructure, infrastructure and mathematical languages. One of the principal goals of our semantics is to provide access to the generic modularisation constructs available in institutions, including specification-building operators for parameterisation and refinement. We demonstrate how these features subsume and enhance the corresponding features already present in Event-B through a detailed study of their use in a worked example. We have implemented our approach via a parser and translator for Event-B specifications, EBtoEVT, which also provides a gateway to the Hets toolkit for heterogeneous specification.

Formalising Liveness Properties in Event-B with the Reflexive EB4EB Framework

“…A meta-level study of Event-B context structure is proposed in particular to validate the expected properties of theorem instantiation [5]. Event-B has also been formalised as an institution in category theory [15,14], with the aim to facilitate and enable composition of heterogeneous semantics and of different model specifications. Similarly, Event-B has been embedded in Coq [10] in order to establish the correctness of refinement, i.e.…”