JBTools: an experimental platform for the formal B method

Abstract

The B method, developed by Jean-Raymond Abrial, is a formal method which enables an incremental development process (also known as the refinement process). The distribution of the B Method and the creation of experimental research tools face constraints of the market for existing tools: cost, limited access, and limited number of systems (hardware and software) requiring this kind of support. The purpose of the jBTools project is to solve this problem by proposing an open-source platform. In this article, we will present the architecture of the platform, the available base tools (User Interface, Parser, Type Checker) producing an XML format and the optimized code generator for the French project RNTL BOM2.