The yearly conference of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, FMICS, the key conference at the intersection of industrial applications and formal methods, reached its 25th edition this year. Therefore, a panel “Genesis, Success Stories, and the Next 25 Years” was organized to celebrate this remarkable milestone. The conference took place virtually on 2-3 September, hosted by TU Wien.
The aim of the FMICS conference series is to provide a forum for researchers interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. It strives to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications.
The conference was chaired by Maurice ter Beek (ISTI-CNR, Italy) and Dejan Ničković (AIT, Austria) and organized under the umbrella of QONFEST 2020 organized by Ezio Bartocci (TU Wien, Austria). FMICS attracted a record number of 149 participants from many countries worldwide, both from academia and industry. QONFEST attracted over 400 participants.
A good number of 26 papers was submitted, of which 11 were accepted. The program included three keynote lectures, partially shared with the QONFEST conferences CONCUR, FORMATS and QEST, by Roderick Bloem (TU Graz, Austria), Thomas Henzinger (IST, Austria), and Stefan Resch (Thales, Austria).
Following a tradition established over the years, Springer provided an award for the best FMICS paper. This year, the reviewers selected the contribution “Verifiable and Scalable Mission-Plan Synthesis for Multiple Autonomous Agents” by Rong Gu, Eduard Enoiu, Cristina Seceleanu, and Kristina Lundqvist for the FMICS 2020 Best Paper Award.
The founders and previous chairpersons of the ERCIM WG FMICS acted as panelists. Diego Latella (ISTI-CNR) recalled the original motivation and beginning of FMICS, Stefania Gnesi (ISTI-CNR) shared some success stories, and Hubert Garavel (Inria) presented a study on the future of formal methods and their adoption in industry. The detailed report [1] of this study, included in the proceedings [2] published by Springer as volume 12327 in their LNCS series, presents an analysis of the opinions of 130 renowned experts in formal methods, as well as thought-provoking position statements on formal methods of 111 of them.
https://fmics20.ait.ac.at/
References:
[1] H. Garavel, M.H. ter Beek, and J. van de Pol: “The 2020 Expert Survey on Formal Methods”,.in [2], pp. 3-69. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58298-2_1
[2] M. H. ter Beek and Dejan Ničković (eds.): “Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS'20)”, Vienna, Austria, 2-3 September 2020. Springer LNCS 12327, 2020. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45943-1
Please contact:
Maurice ter Beek, ISTI-CNR, Italy