Publications

 This Festschrift volume, published to honour both Dines Bjørner and Zhou Chaochen on the occasion of their 70th birthdays in October and November 2007, includes 25 refereed papers by leading researchers, current and former colleagues, who congregated at a celebratory symposium held in Macao, China, in the course of the International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2007. The papers cover a broad spectrum of subjects, from foundational and theoretical topics to algorithms and systems issues and to applications, comprising formal methods, systems modelling, hybrid and real-time systems, specification and verification, as well as interval temporal logic.Dines Bjørner is known for his many contributions to the theory and practice of formal methods for software engineering with special focus on abstraction and modelling, specification of systems and languages, and domains, requirements, and software design. He was a professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby, near Copenhagen; he was the founding director of the United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) in Macao during the 1990s; and a co-founder of VDM-Europe, which became Formal Methods Europe, an organisation that promotes the use of formal methods.Zhou Chaochen is known for his seminal contributions to the theory and practice of timed and hybrid systems. Starting at Peking University and as a postgraduate at the Institute for Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he continued his career with an extended visit to Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where he was the prime instigator of the Duration Calculus, an interval logic for real-time systems. He also worked as a visiting professor at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, at the invitation of Prof. Dines Bjørner. He was a principal research fellow at UNU-IIST during the period 1992-97, before becoming its director, an appointment he held from 1997 to 2002.

 This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing, ICTAC 2007 held in Macau, China in September 2007.The 29 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and summaries of 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. The aim of the colloquium is to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia, industry and government to present research results, and exchange experience, ideas, and solutions for their problems in theoretical aspects of computing such as automata theory and formal languages, principles and semantics of programming languages, software architectures and their description languages, software specification, refinement, and verification, model checking and theorem proving, real-time, embedded and hybrid systems, theory of parallel, distributed, and internet-based (grid) computing, simulation and modeling, and service-oriented development.

This book presents thoroughly revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by leading researchers at the International Training School on Domain Modeling and the Duration Calculus, held in Shanghai, China, in September 2007 as an associated event of ICTAC 2007, the 4th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing.The four tutorial papers presented provide competent coverage of software security, domain modeling of software engineering, and duration calculus for real time systems - originating from lectures of leading experts in these fields from Europe and Asia. Topics addressed in detail are: development of real-time systems, domain engineering using abstract modeling, the area of duration calculus, and formal methods like language description using the operational semantics approach.