Supporting reuse of Event-B developments through generic instantiation

Description/Abstract

It is believed that reusability in formal development should reduce the time and cost of formal modelling within a production environment. Along with the ability to reuse formal models, it is desirable to avoid unnecessary re-proof when reusing models. Event-B is a formal method that allows modelling and refinement of systems. Event-B supports generic developments through the context construct. Nevertheless Event-B lacks the ability to instantiate and reuse generic developments in other formal developments. We propose a way of instantiating generic models and extending the instantiation to a chain of refinements. We define sufficient proof obligations to ensure that the proofs associated to a generic development remain valid in an instantiated development thus avoiding re-proofs.