We give a canonical program refinement calculus based on the lambda calculus and classical first-order predicate logic, and study its proof theory and semantics. The intention is to construct a metalanguage for refinement in which basic principles of program development can be studied. The idea is that it should be possible to induce a refinement calculus in a generic manner from a programming ...

Einstein explicitly used the term ‘unified field theory’ in the title of a publication for the first time in 1925. Ten more papers appeared in which the term is used in the title, but Einstein had dealt with the topic already in half a dozen publications before 1925. In total he wrote more than forty technical papers on the subject. This work represents roughly a fourth of his overall oeuvre of...

Recent progress in automated formal verification is to a large degree due to the development of constraint languages that are sufficiently light-weight for reasoning but still expressive enough to prove properties of programs. Satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers implement efficient decision procedures, but offer little direct support for adapting the constraint language to the task at ...

Program logics are modal logics used in software/hardware specii-cation/veriication for sound reasoning about programs. Program logics comprised dynamic logics, temporal logics, logics of process(es), and their extensions by means of xpoints. A more recent addition to the family of program logics are logics of knowledge and belief. The talk introduces (on an informal level) several popular prog...

Program theory evaluation, which has grown in use over the past 10 years, assesses whether a program is designed in such a way that it can achieve its intended outcomes. This article describes a particular type of program theory evaluation-logic analysis-that allows us to test the plausibility of a program's theory using scientific knowledge. Logic analysis is useful for improving the intervent...

A utility function is an important tool for representing a DM’s preference. We adjoin utility functions to multi-objective optimization problems. In current studies, usually one utility function is used for each objective function. Situations may arise for a goal to have multiple utility functions. Here, we consider a constrained multi-objective problem with each objective having multiple utili...