The book presents the life and works of one of Germany's most famous computer scientists, Carl Adam Petri. It is written in a vivid and entertaining manner, providing an in-depth discussion of the background behind Petri's best-known contribution to computer science, the Petri net. In this way the book can be read as a first introduction to nets, but it also covers the theoretical, physical and philosophical foundations behind nets, thus facilitating a comprehensive understanding of the wider range of Petri's works. The book is intended for readers with a previous knowledge in computer science, as well as for "interested non-professionals", who want to get to know a remarkable personality of contemporary science.

The book presents the life and works of one of Germany's most famous computer scientists, Carl Adam Petri. It is written in a vivid and entertaining manner, providing an in-depth discussion of the background behind Petri's best-known contribution to computer science, the Petri net. In this way the book can be read as a first introduction to nets, but it also covers the theoretical, physical and philosophical foundations behind nets, thus facilitating a comprehensive understanding of the wider range of Petri's works. The book is intended for readers with a previous knowledge in computer science, as well as for "interested non-professionals", who want to get to know a remarkable personality of contemporary science.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Second International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, held in Barcelona, Spain in October 1994.
Besides two invited papers and seven industrial usage reports, there are 32 full papers selected from some 150 submissions. The industrial usage reports describe practical experiences in a variety of areas including security systems and railway signalling. The subjects of the research papers include refinement, proof, process modelling, specification of programming languages, model checking, real-time aspects, and the combination of formal and systematic methods; these contributions advance the foundations of formal methods and demonstrate their practical value.

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.

This book contains the eight invited papers presented at the workshop on Formal Aspects of Measurement held at South Bank University on 5th May 1991, organised by the British Computer Society's Special Interest Group on Formal Aspects of Computer Science (FACS). In addition, there are five papers which have been included because of their relevance to the subject of the workshop. The book represents something of a landmark in software engineering research. The British Computer Society's Special Interest Group on Formal Aspects of Computer Science (FACS) has an established reputa tion among researchers in formal methods of software specification, design and validation. These researchers have not in the past paid much attention to software measurement. Perhaps software measurement re search was felt to have emphasised its management potential at the expense of proper scientific foundations? At any rate, for the FACS group to host a workshop in this field is recognition of the significant body of formal measurement theories and techniques which has now become available to software engineers."