The major school and symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems FTRTFT) is jointly organised by the ProCoS-WG Working Group (locally organised by Universität Kiel) in co-operation with an existing series of symposia. There will be a number of lectures on the associated ProCoS II project forming a co-ordinated tutorial on the work of the project. The proceedings are due to appear in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, as they have done for the last two symposia [26] [36]. The invited talks and school lectures may be published separately as they have been before [37]. ProCoS project and Working Group partners have been especially encouraged to submit papers to and participate in this symposium. It is the major open meeting of the Working Group to which all external participants are welcome. Please contact the author for further information.
A number of papers and tutorials by personnel from ProCoS-WG sites contributed to the 1994 Z User Meeting (ZUM'94) at the University of Cambridge, UK (one of the Working Group sites). This is the 8th meeting in this series and previous proceedings have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Workshops in Computing series (e.g., [11]). In particular, Mike Gordon, the ProCoS-WG technical contact at the University of Cambridge, and Jim Woodcock of Oxford University gave invited talks on mechanising Z using the HOL theorem prover [7] and on the use of Z to specify the UK MoD 00-56 draft standard [38]. Other presentations were from Oxford University [14], Praxis [20] [22], the University of Warsaw (concerning work on the Duration Calculus associated with ProCoS via the Technical University of Denmark) [17], and the University of York [21] [35]. A standards panel session is also being organised by John Nicholls of Oxford University.
At ZUM'94 Prof. Maurice Wilkes of Olivetti Research Limited gave a speech on the occasion of the 45th anniversary to the week of the first European computer conference originally hosted by Maurice Wilkes in Cambridge in 1949, and there was a small display of Babbage and EDSAC memorabilia from Cambridge and the Science Museum in London, making this an historic event. Jonathan Bowen (Oxford University) was the conference chair, Anthony Hall (Praxis Systems plc) was the programme chair, and Mike Hinchey (University of Cambridge) was the tutorial chair, all from ProCoS-WG sites.
Both the Technical University of Denmark and Oxford University are using the formal specification notation Z as part of their work on the ProCoS project. Other ProCoS-WG sites, such as DST, IFAD and York, also use and produce tools for both Z and VDM. A further Z User Meeting is planned during the lifetime of the Working Group, at the University of Limerick, Ireland, 7-8 September 1995.
ProCoS-WG encourages interaction between various formal methods communities such as those associated with Z, VDM, HOL, etc. (E.g., see [7].) Several partners are involved with Formal Methods Europe and its associated FME Symposia and FACS Europe newsletter. We maintain contact particularly via Martyn Thomas, Chairman of both Praxis (a ProCoS-WG site) and FME.