by Stefan Kowalewski and Marco Roveri
The 15th ERCIM Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS) workshop was held in Antwerp, Belgium, on 20-21 September 2010. It was co-located with the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).
The aim of the FMICS workshop series, organized annually by the ERCIM FMICS Working Group, 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 engineers who are active in the area of formal methods and are interested in exchanging their experiences 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 chosen for FMICS 2010 included, but were not restricted to:
Design, specification, code generation and testing based on formal methods.
Methods, techniques and tools to support automated analysis, certification, debugging, learning, optimization and transformation of complex, distributed, real-time systems and embedded systems.
Verification and validation methods that address shortcomings of existing methods with respect to their industrial applicability (e.g., scalability and usability issues).
Tools for the development of formal design descriptions.
Case studies and experience reports on industrial applications of formal methods, focusing on lessons learned or identification of new research directions.
Impact of the adoption of formal methods on the development process and associated costs.
Application of formal methods in standardization and industrial forums.
FMICS 2010 received 30 submissions from 19 countries, 14 of which have been selected after a thorough reviewing process. Each paper was reviewed by at least four program committee members or external referees that selected the papers basing their choice on the paper scientific quality, originality and relevance to the workshop. The presentations covered a wide range of topics, mostly focusing on applying model checking and abstract interpretation to reason about software. In addition to the regular talks, FMICS featured four invited talks by Stephan Tobies (Microsoft European Innovation Center), Axel Simon (Technical University of Munich), Aarti Gupta (NEC Labs), and Bert van Beek (Technical University of Eindhoven). The resulting program offered the participants a complete landscape of the recent advances in this area. On-site proceedings were published by Springer-Verlag as volume 6371 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Following a tradition established over the past few years, the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST) offered an award to the best FMICS paper. This year, the award was given to Alessandro Fantechi for the paper “The Metrô Rio ATP Case Study” (http://www.springerlink.com/content/vh0734j73j8q5002/), written together with Alessio Ferrari, Daniele Grasso, Gianluca Magnani, and Matteo Tempestini. The award was presented by Stefan Kowalewski and Marco Roveri, PC co-chair of FMICS 2010 (see photo).
From left: Marco Roveri, Alessandro Fantechi, and Stefan Kowalewski.
Links:
http://es.fbk.eu/events/fmics2010
http://www.inrialpes.fr/vasy/fmics
http://www.easst.org/
http://soft.vub.ac.be/ase2010/
Please contact:
Marco Roveri
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, FBK-irst
E-mail: