Authors: Marie Farrell ; Rosemary Monahan ; James F. Power

This paper describes a formal semantics for the Event-B specification language using the theory of institutions. We define an institution for Event-B, EVT, and prove that it meets the validity requirements for satisfaction preservation and model amalgamation. We also present a series of functions that show how the constructs of the Event-B specification language can be mapped into our institution. Our semantics sheds new light on the structure of the Event-B language, allowing us to clearly delineate three constituent sub-languages: the superstructure, infrastructure and mathematical languages. One of the principal goals of our semantics is to provide access to the generic modularisation constructs available in institutions, including specification-building operators for parameterisation and refinement. We demonstrate how these features subsume and enhance the corresponding features already present in Event-B through a detailed study of their use in a worked example. We have implemented our approach via a parser and translator for Event-B specifications, EBtoEVT, which also provides a gateway to the Hets toolkit for heterogeneous specification.

• 03B45 - Modal logic (including the logic of norms)
• 03B70 - Logic in computer science
• 03F52 - Proof-theoretic aspects of linear logic and other substructural logics
• 03G30 - Categorical logic, topoi
• 18F70 - Frames and locales, pointfree topology, Stone duality
• 68-XX - Computer science