Results on formal stepwise design in Z

Stepwise design involves the process of deriving a concrete model of a software system from a given abstract one. This process is sometimes known as refinement. There are numerous refinement theories proposed in the literature, each of which stipulates the nature of the relationship between an abstract specification and its concrete counterpart. This paper considers six refinement theories in Z that have been proposed by various people over the years. However no systematic investigation of these theories, or results on the relationships between them, have been presented or published before. This paper shows that these theories fall into two important categories and proves that the theories in each category are equivalent.