Building Specifications in the Event-B Institution

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal semantics for the Event-B specification language using the theory of institutions, enabling modularization, parameterization, and refinement, with an implementation that integrates with existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces an institution-based semantics for Event-B, clarifies its structure, and enhances its modularization and refinement features with a practical parser and translator.

Findings

Validated the institution-based semantics for Event-B

Demonstrated improved modularization and refinement capabilities

Implemented a parser and translator integrating with Hets

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.