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The 6th FAACS @ ECSA 2022

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The 6th edition of the international workshop on Formal Approaches for Advanced Computing Systems (FAACS 2022) is co-located with the 16th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA). It will be held hybrid, the physical venue will be in Prague, Czech Republic, September 20, 2022.

Important dates

  • Submission deadline (extended): July 1, 2022 July 10, 2022
  • Notification: July 29, 2022
  • Workshop papers (LNCS) camera-ready (extended): August 5, 2022 August 8, 2022
  • Workshop: September 20, 2022
  • Post-proceedings (LNCS): TBD

Motivation and Scope

The way services and information are currently delivered to a multitude of end-users is changing impressively thanks to the availability of new technologies (e.g., IoT connectivity, digitalization, and smart devices) and complex computational models (e.g., autonomic, adaptive computing, and artificial intelligence). Many approaches used nowadays to develop such large, complex, advanced software systems are still not able to ensure the correctness and dependability of the delivered products. Emerging technologies and methodologies gain great popularity while some of their aspects are developed ad-hoc, not rigorously, due to the lack of more formal approaches. Nevertheless, unreliable or unpredictable behavior, such as threats to confidentiality and even financial or health danger, cannot be tolerated as society increasingly depends on them. Assuring safety, security, privacy, performance, trustworthiness and other important qualities of such systems currently represents a challenge that calls for novel rigorous and formal approaches to system design, development, validation, and verification. Indeed, in the digitalized era where physical artifacts are controlled by their Digital Twins, unexpected exposure of users to unwanted behaviors is highly undesirable.

The goal of the workshop is to foster integration between formal methods and software architecture promoting new connections and synergies between the two research communities in order to address the challenges of the upcoming generation of computing systems.

Topics of Interest

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • requirements formalization and formal specification
  • formal/semi-formal architecture design, validation and verification, quality analysis and evaluation
  • formal/semi-formal approaches to digitalization, development of digital society and Digital Twins
  • methodologies and approaches focusing on addressing challenges of modern computing systems that are currently addressed ad-hoc
  • architecture description languages and metamodels
  • architectural patterns, styles and tactics, view-points and views
  • architecture transformation and refinement, architecture based synthesis
  • model-driven engineering
  • approaches and tools for verification and validation
  • performance analysis based on formal approaches
  • compliance assurance using formal methods
  • application of methodologies, theories, approaches and techniques specific to the aforementioned areas to AI-based, autonomous, robotic, cyber-physical, and self-adaptive systems
  • reports on practical experience in the application of formal methods to industrial case studies

Submission

Submissions must follow the LNCS style . All papers should be submitted before the submission deadline (see below) using the online submission site: EasyChair FAACS 2022 Workshop.

We solicit the following contribution types:

  • Full paper (12 pages + 2 extra pages for references): original research contributions, case studies, or report on work or experiences in industry.
  • Short papers (8 pages + 2 extra pages for references): work-in-progress, new and disruptive ideas, techniques and/or tools or extensions not fully validated yet.

Submit via Easychair

Publication and proceedings

ECSA 2022 will use a two-step process for workshop proceedings. Online proceedings (available before the start of the conference) will include all the accepted papers of the workshops and will be published online on the ECSA 2022 web page (no proceedings). The accepted papers will be accessible only by the ECSA 2022 workshop participants and the format should conform to LNCS style. After the conference, we will organise post-proceedings of selected and extended papers of workshops that will be published in a Springer LNCS volume (up to 16 pages). Workshop papers submitted for the post-proceedings will undergo a minor revision cycle where the extensions with respect to the workshop versions will be checked by the reviewers.

springer

Important dates

  • Submission deadline (extended): July 1, 2022 July 10, 2022
  • Notification: July 29, 2022
  • Workshop papers (LNCS) camera-ready(extended): August 5, 2022 August 8, 2022
  • Workshop: September 20, 2022
  • Post-proceedings (LNCS): TBD

Program

September 20, 2022, 09:00 - 11:30 (hybrid event)

  • 09:00 - 09:10 Opening
  • 09:10 - 10:00 Keynote: "On architecting software with lightweight formal models at runtime for the assurance of correct operation" by Patrizia Scandurra, University of Bergamo, Italy
  • 10:00 - 10:30 Paper #1: "A Maude Formalization of Object Nets" Authors: Lorenzo Capra and Michael Köhler-Bußmeier
  • 10:30 - 11:00 Break
  • 11:00 - 11:20 Paper #2: "Towards Online Testing Under Uncertainty with Model-based Reinforcement Learning" Authors: Matteo Camilli, Raffaela Mirandola, Patrizia Scandurra and Catia Trubiani
  • 11:20 - 11:30 Closing

Keynote Speaker: Patrizia Scandurra

Patrizia Scandurra

Bio: Patrizia Scandurra is Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering of the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her research interests are in software engineering with particular attention to software architectures and formal methods for software modeling, validation, verification and testing. Her research focus is the design and runtime analysis of self-adaptive, autonomous distributed software systems operating in uncertain environments. She regularly publishes the results of her research in international conferences and ranked journals. She has been a member of the organizing and program committees of international conferences/workshops of formal methods, software architectures and self-adaptive software systems, such as ISSRE, ABZ, ECSA, ICSA, SEAMS@ICSE, SA-TTA@SAC, and FAACS@ECSA. She has been involved in several national and European projects on themes such as model-driven development for embedded and robotic systems, adaptive software architectures for pervasive systems, and enforceable trust in Cloud-based software applications. She also collaborated with R&I (research and innovation) groups of industries/organizations like STMicroelectronics, Atego, Bialetti, and the ENEA Smart Cities & Communities lab.

Title: On architecting software with lightweight formal models at runtime for the assurance of correct operation.

Abstract: Today software systems call for built-in adaptive mechanisms to handle faults, resources, and attacks while operating in much more uncertain environments. In the last decade, mathematically-based techniques from the area of formal methods have been successfully employed at runtime to provide evidence for requirements compliance of self-adaptive software systems. Usually, existing approaches to providing assurances for self-adaptive systems are based on formal verification techniques (like model checking, runtime verification, and quantitative verification). More lightweight validation-based approaches (like sanity checks and runtime simulation) have been given much less attention. This talk provides a quick overview on current strategies for making formal models an integral part of the target running system's architecture, and on existing on-line versions of verification techniques for the runtime assurance of the desired, correct system operation. This talk then complements such preliminary efforts by exploring the possibility to exploit lightweight, formal validation techniques at runtime. In particular, the talk focuses on the safety assurance of software systems via safety enforcement mechanisms for observing and steering the running software system. We present how we have exploited the runtime simulation of Abstract State Machines (ASMs@run.time) to realize runtime models of safety enforcement strategies. The talk concludes with a discussion of the challenges in employing formal methods at runtime and of the future research required to overcome them.

Program co-chairs

  • Silvia Bonfanti, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
  • Tsutomu Kobayashi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Tsukuba, Japan
  • Diego Perez-Palacin, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
  • Program committee

    • Yamine Ait Ameur, IRIT/INPT-ENSEEIHT, France
    • Paolo Arcaini, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
    • Marcello M. Bersani, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
    • Chiara Braghin, University of Milan, Italy
    • Einar Broch Johnsen, University of Oslo, Norway
    • Radu Calinescu, University of York, UK
    • Matteo Camilli, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
    • Antonio Filieri, Imperial College, UK
    • Stefan Hallerstede, Aarhus University, Denmark
    • Jan Kofron, Charles University, Czech Republic
    • Claudio Menghi, McMaster University, Canada
    • Pedro Ribeiro, University of York, UK
    • Catia Trubiani, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy

    Steering committee

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