Future prospects

As one of a number of formal methods in use, the B method's industrial tooling has enabled it to be used not only in mission-critical projects, but also for applications other than software. In the near future, it will be possible for the B method to be used in less critical systems, by improving the user-friendliness of the tools and enabling engineers who are not experts in the B method to specify and design systems that can be proved mathematically, provided they have people who are familiar with the mathematical formalism. It will also very probably be possible to deal with distributed systems, parallelism and all the critical aspects associated with redundancy switching.

European projects such as PUSSEE, whose objective was the proven development of systems combining hardware and software (with a B/VHDL and System-C translator, a UML application profile adapted...