ERCIM News 72

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January 2008
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The Future Web

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12th International ERCIM Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems

by Stefan Leue and Pedro Merino

Last year's ERCIM Workshop on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) was affiliated with the Computer Aided Verification (CAV) conference, held in Berlin on 1-2 July 2007.

The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, these workshops are intended to bring together scientists and practitioners who are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experience in the industrial usage of these methods. These workshops also strive to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications.

The topics for which contributions to FMICS 2007 were solicited included, but were not restricted to, the following:

  • design, specification, code generation and testing with formal methods
  • verification and validation of complex, distributed real-time systems and embedded systems
  • verification and validation methods that aim at circumventing shortcomings of existing methods with respect to their industrial applicability
  • tools for the design and development of formal descriptions
  • case studies and project reports on formal methods related projects with industrial participation (eg safety critical systems, mobile systems, object-based distributed systems)
  • application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums.
From left: Pedro Merino ERCIM FMICS Working Group coordinator and workshop co-organiser; Ganesh Gopalakrishnan winner of the FMICS best paper award; and Stefan Leue, University of Konstanz, workshop co-organiser.
From left: Pedro Merino ERCIM FMICS Working Group coordinator and workshop co-organiser; Ganesh Gopalakrishnan winner of the FMICS best paper award; and Stefan Leue, University of Konstanz, workshop co-organiser.

The workshop included five sessions of regular contributions and three invited presentations, given by Charles Pecheur, Thomas Henzinger and Gérard Berry. In addition to the participant's proceedings, a volume in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series published by Springer Verlag will be devoted to FMICS 2007. The papers included in the LNCS volume were selected from a second round of peer reviewing.

FMICS 2007 attracted 33 participants, some of them are members of the FMICS Working Group, from fourteen different countries.

We wish to thank the members of the programme committee and the additional reviewers for their careful evaluation of the submitted papers (fifteen papers have been selected out of 31 submitted). We are very grateful to the local organisers of the CAV conference and to University of Dortmund for allowing us to use their online conference service.

Following a tradition established over the past years, the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST) offered an award to the best FMICS paper. This year's award was given to Robert Palmer, Michael DeLisi, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan and Robert M. Kirby for their paper 'An Approach to Formalization and Analysis of Message Passing Libraries'.

Link:
FMICS Working Group and the next FMICS workshop: http://www.inrialpes.fr/vasy/fmics

Please contact:
Pedro Merino
University of Malaga / SpaRCIM, Spain
E-mail: pedro@lcc.uma.es
http://www.lcc.uma.es/~pedro