Abstract State Machines, B and Z

The ABZ 2008 conference was held in London during September 16-18, 2008. The conference aimed at contributing to the cross-fertilization of three rigorous methods that share a common conceptual foundation and are widely used in both academia and industry for the design and analysis of hardware and so- waresystems,namely,abstractstate machines,B, andZ. It followedonfromthe Dagstuhl seminar on Rigorous Methods for Software Construction and Ana- sis, which was organized in May 2006 by Jean-Raymond Abrial (ETH Zur ¨ ich, Switzerland) and Uwe Gl¨ asser (Simon Fraser University - Burnaby, Canada), and brought together researchers from the ASM and the B community (see: http://www. dagstuhl. de/06191). The conference simultaneously incorporated the 15th International ASM Workshop, the 17th International Conference of Z Users and the 8th Inter- tional Conference on the B Method, which were present with separate Program Committees to select the papers published in separate tracks (see Chapters 2-4 of these proceedings). The conference covered a wide range of researchspanning from theoretical and methodological foundations to tool support and practical applications. It was split into three main parts: - Aone-daycommonprogramoffourinvitedlectures,seeChap. 1ofthesep- ceedings,and the presentationof three papers selected among the submitted contributions - Two days of contributed research papers and short presentations of work in progress, of industrial experience reports and of tool demonstrations, as documented in Chap.