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The 9th FAACS @ ICSA 2025

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The 9th edition of the international workshop on Formal Approaches for Advanced Computing Systems (FAACS 2025) is co-located with the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2025). It will be held in Odense, Denmark March 31-April 4, 2025.

Important dates

  • Abstract Registration (Mandatory): December 27, 2024
  • Submission Deadline (Extended): December 20, 2024 January 4, 2025
  • Notification: January 20, 2025
  • Camera-ready version: January 27, 2025
  • Workshop: March 31, 2025

Motivation and Scope

Cutting-edge technologies, infrastructures, and computational paradigms such as digital twin, cloud, fog, edge computing, IoT, digitalization, Industry 5.0, and cyber-physical systems are changing how data and services are delivered and used. Such systems have a significant and elaborate societal impact, making it paramount to guarantee essential qualities of the delivered product, such as dependability, reliability, safety, and availability. As new paradigms become pervasive in our everyday lives, new challenges also emerge in dealing with uncertainty, untrustworthiness, and information loss, affecting the software life cycle in different phases. Ensuring critical qualities requires a joint effort in devising advanced software architecture designs by the software architecture community and formal modeling and verification approaches by the formal methods community.

The main objective of FAACS is to strengthen the linkage between the formal methods and the software architecture communities and stimulate researchers to share novel ideas and lessons learned from industrial and academic experts from various application domains and software disciplines. Aligned with the theme of the ICSA 2025, we welcome contributions on the potential and risks of generative AI in developing advanced software architectures and ensuring qualities like dependability, reliability, safety, and availability through formal modeling and verification.

Topics of Interest

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • requirements formalization and formal specification with or without the use of generative AI
  • formal/semi-formal architectural design, validation and verification, quality analysis and evaluation
  • integrating formal/semi-formal methods and architecture-centric software engineering for Edge-to-Cloud Computing Continuum, IoT and smart environments, AI/ML systems, systems using blockchains, cyber physical systems, self-adaptive and autonomous systems
  • formal/semi-formal approaches to digitalization, development of digital society and Digital Twins
  • architecture requirements formalization and specification
  • architecture description languages and meta-models
  • architectural patterns, styles and tactics, viewpoints and views
  • architecture transformation and refinement, architecture-based synthesis
  • formal techniques and architecture-based approaches for ensuring software quality (reliability, safety, performance, trustworthiness, etc.) and social properties (sustainability, ethics, explainability, etc.)
  • approaches and tools for verification and validation
  • formal techniques to tackle uncertainty or information loss in software systems, including AI-based systems
  • generalization of methodologies and approaches addressing the development and delivery of modern computing systems
  • applications to areas of interest, including (but not limited) to AI-based, autonomous, robotic, cyber-physical, and self-adaptive and autonomous systems
  • experience reports on the application of formal methods to industrial case studies

Submission

All submissions will follow the IEEE Computer Science proceedings format. Submitted papers must be written in English and conform to the the IEEE Guidelines including the guidelines for AI-Generated text. Submissions must be done before the deadline in PDF format via the EasyChair submission system.

We solicit the following contribution types:

  • Full paper (10 pages): original research contributions, case studies, or report on work or experiences in industry.
  • Short papers (6 pages): work-in-progress, new and disruptive ideas, techniques and/or tools or extensions not fully validated yet.
  • Position papers (2 pages): contributions that analyze trends and raise relevant issues related to the workshop themes. Position papers will also be reviewed based on their ability to spark discussions at the workshop.
  • Tool competition entries (4 pages): this type invites the submission of innovative solutions addressing problem(s) related to the workshop themes.

Submit via Easychair

Publication and proceedings

All accepted papers will be published in ICSA 2025 Companion proceedings, and appear in IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Important dates

  • Abstract Registration (Mandatory): December 27, 2024
  • Submission Deadline (Extended): December 20, 2024 January 4, 2025
  • Notification: January 20, 2025
  • Camera-ready version: January 27, 2025
  • Workshop: March 31, 2025

Program

March 31st, 2025, [time zone: (GMT+1) CEST]

  • 08:30 - 09:00 Registration
  • 09:00 - 09:10 Opening
  • 09:10 - 10:00 Invited Talk #1 by Prof. Jacopo Mauro
    Title: Analysis of Affinity-Aware Function Scheduling in Serverless Platforms
    Abstract: Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) offers a flexible and scalable execution model where stateless functions are scheduled dynamically by the cloud provider. The increasing complexity of function placement policies—particularly in affinity-aware scenarios where execution depends on co-location constraints—raises fundamental questions about the reachability and safety of function deployments. In this talk, I will present a formal analysis of the reachability problem in two scheduling specification languages: APP and its affinity-aware extension, aAPP. While APP allows for efficient linear-time verification, incorporating affinity constraints introduces significant computational challenges, making reachability NP-hard or even PSPACE-complete in certain cases. I will discuss how these complexities emerge and demonstrate how a planning-based approach using PDDL can be leveraged to verify reachability properties.

  • 10:00 - 10:30 Coffee break

  • 10:30 - 11:00 Paper #1: "User Identification Procedures with Human Mutations: Formal Analysis and Pilot Study" Authors: Megha Quamara and Luca Viganò
  • 11:00 - 11:30 Paper #2: "Leveraging LLMs to Automate Software Architecture Design from Informal Specifications" Authors: Alberto Tagliaferro, Simone Corbo and Bruno Guindani

  • 11:30 - 12:30 Lunch break

  • 12:30 - 13:30 Invited Talk #2 by Prof. Qusai Ramadan
    Title: Fairness of Decision-Making Software by Design
    Abstract: As decision-making software shapes critical areas of life, such as hiring, lending, criminal justice, and healthcare, concerns about fairness and bias are growing. Fairness is often an afterthought, addressed only during testing or deployment. This talk argues that fairness must be a core aspect of software development, starting from the requirements engineering phase. The session will explore current research on fairness-aware software development. It will show how integrating fairness into design can lead to more trustworthy decision-making systems. Finally, the talk will outline future research directions, including interdisciplinary approaches and new techniques for fairness in AI-driven systems. The goal is to inspire researchers and practitioners to embed fairness into software engineering from the start.

  • 13:30 - 14:00 Paper #3: "Semi-Automated Design of Data-Intensive Architectures" Authors: Arianna Dragoni and Alessandro Margara
  • 14:30 - 15:00 Paper #4: "Business Process Lifecycle Enhancement via Digital Twin and Model-Driven Engineering" Authors: Samuele Giussani, Diego Perez, Mauro Caporuscio and Farid Edrisi

  • 15:00 - 15:10 Closing

Program co-chairs

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Important Links

Venue

  • Odense, Denmark

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