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External and internal choice with event groups in Event-B

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Abrial’s Event-B formalism for refinement-based system development is influenced by Back’s action system approach. Morgan has defined a CSP-like failures-divergence semantics for action systems that distinguishes internal and external choice of actions. Morgan’s semantics has the characteristic that the choice between enabled actions is external while internal choice is represented less directly through nondeterministic effect of actions. Practical experience with Event-B has demonstrated the need to be able to represent both internal and external choice between enabled events more explicitly. In this paper, Morgan’s failures semantics for action systems is modified to allow both internal and external choice to be represented directly. This is achieved by grouping events so that external choice is between event groups and internal choice is within event groups. This leads to a refinement rule for preservation of choice between event groups while allowing for reduction of choice within event groups. We also provide a refinement rule for splitting event groups in order to increase external choice. The refinement rules are justified in terms of failures refinement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Michael Butler

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  1. Michael Butler
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Correspondence to Michael Butler.

Additional information

Peter Höfner, Robert van Glabbeek, Ian Hayes and Jim Woodcock

This work is supported by the FP7 DEPLOY Project (ICT 214158). http://www.deploy-project.eu.

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Butler, M. External and internal choice with event groups in Event-B. Form Asp Comp 24, 555–567 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0239-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0239-2

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