The overarching goal of formal methods
is to help engineers construct more reliable systems. Formal methods is thus
an area that cuts across almost all other
areas in computer science. Its foundations lie squarely in mathematics, its
intended applications are hardware and
software systems, and its potential users are all developers involved in the
system engineering process.
Tremendous advances in the past decade have been made on all fronts. As
technology improves, it becomes more
feasible to attack harder and larger
problems. Progress in the area depends
on doing fundamental research, inventing new methods and building new
tools, integrating different methods to
work together, and making concerted
efforts by researchers to work with
practitioners to transfer technology effectively