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Teaching Formal Methods to Undergraduate Students Using Maude

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Rewriting Logic and Its Applications (WRLA 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13252))

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Abstract

I have been teaching an introductory formal methods course based on Maude—first to third- and fourth-year students, and lately to second-year students—at the University of Oslo for a number of years. The first part of the course introduces functional modules in Maude and covers basic topics in term rewriting, whereas the second part of the course uses Maude to formally model and analyze a number of classic distributed systems, including: transport protocols such as the alternating bit and the sliding windows protocols, the two-phase commit protocol for distributed atomic commitment, distributed algorithms for mutual exclusion and leader election, and authentication protocols.

In this invited “experience report” I briefly motivate the use of Maude for an introductory formal methods course, outline the course content, and summarize student feedback and my own impressions about the course.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I once got complaints from the head of studies for supposedly having shown a quantifier in a lecture!

  2. 2.

    The function sd gives the difference between two natural numbers, since subtraction is not defined on natural numbers.

  3. 3.

    The command echo and some other Maude output are not shown.

  4. 4.

    ‘[]’ and ‘\(\texttt {<>}\)’ denote the temporal operators \(\Box \) and \(\Diamond \), respectively, and ‘/\ and ‘\(\texttt {->}\)’ denote logical conjunction and implication.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kyungmin Bae for inviting me to give an invited talk at WRLA 2022, and for patiently waiting for this paper to be finished.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Peter Csaba Ölveczky

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  1. Peter Csaba Ölveczky
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Correspondence to Peter Csaba Ölveczky .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Korea (Republic of)

    Kyungmin Bae

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Ölveczky, P.C. (2022). Teaching Formal Methods to Undergraduate Students Using Maude. In: Bae, K. (eds) Rewriting Logic and Its Applications. WRLA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13252. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12441-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12441-9_5

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