Michael Leuschel, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Institut für Informatik
ProB is an animator and model checker for the B-Method (see the B Site Pages , B-Method site of Clearsy, or the B Formal Methods Virtual Library). It allows fully automatic animation of many B specifications, and can be used to systematically check a specification for errors. In addition to B, ProB now also supports CSP-M and Z. Part of the research and development was conducted within the EPSRC funded projects ABCD and iMoc, and within the EU funded project Rodin. Development is continued under the EU funded project Deploy and the DFG project Gepavas. ProB has been successfully used on various industrial specifications (e.g., from Nokia Research).
Implementation
The core of ProB is implemented in SICStus Prolog (but can be run without a SICStus Prolog license). It uses co-routining and finite domain constraint solving to make animation of B machines possible.
Features
ProB covers a large part of B, and we are striving towards full coverage of Atelier B and B4Free constructs. ProB supports B features such as non-deterministic operations, ANY statements, operations with complex arguments, sets, sequences, functions, lambda abstractions, set comprehensions, records, constants and properties, and many more. Not supported are the Atelier B tree operations and there are restrictions on DEFINITIONS. ProB does support multiple machines, refinements, and implementations. ProB can also be used for automated refinement checking and LTL model checking. It also supports almost full CSP-M process descriptions (as of version 1.2.7), to be used on their own or to guide B machines for specification and property validation. The state space of the specifications can be graphically visualised.
See http://www.stups.uni-duesseldorf.de/ProB/ for more details. In particular the
Why Prolog? discussion.