• Sep 26, 2009: FESCA'09 post-proceedings published by Elsevier in ENTCS
• Sep 01, 2009: FESCA'10 website was launched
• Feb 10, 2009: Workshop programme is now available
• Feb 02, 2009: Registration is now possible through the ETAPS website
• Jan 19, 2009: EasyChair system is now open for camera-ready submissions (a zip file containing all the sources and the final pdf)
• Dec 09, 2008: Deadline for paper submission passed
• Dec 04, 2008: The ENTCS macro for FESCA'09 camera-ready submissions is now available at http://www.entcs.org/files/etaps09/fesca/prentcsmacro.sty
• Dec 04, 2008: Deadline for (registered) paper submission extended to Dec 08, 2008
• Dec 02, 2008: Deadline for paper registration passed
• Oct 13, 2008: EasyChair submission site is now open for
  • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords,
    due December 1, 2008) and
  • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers,
    due December 8, 2008)
• Sept 16, 2008: FESCA'09 Call for Papers (CfP) is now available [TXT] [HTML]
• Sept 10, 2008: Raffaela Mirandola accepted the invitation to give a keynote talk at FESCA'09

Component-based software design has received considerable attention in industry and academia in the past decade. In recent years, the growing need for trustworthy software systems and the increased relevance of systems reliability, performance, and scalability have stimulated the emergence of formal techniques and architecture modelling approaches for the specification and implementation of component-based software architectures. Both have to deal with an increasing complexity in software systems challenging analytical methods as well as modelling techniques.

FESCA aims to address the open question of how formal methods can be applied effectively to these new contexts and challenges. FESCA is interested in both the development and application of formal methods in component-based development and tries to cross-fertilize their research and application.

One strength of FESCA is the link established between the formal methods community and the software engineering community by exploring how formal approaches can be exploited for the analysis of large software architectures.

We encourage submissions on formal techniques and their application that aid reasoning, analysis and certification of component-based enterprise applications. In this context, the following topics are of particular concern:

• Software quality attributes such as reliability, performance, or security as well as their prediction or measurement;
• Temporal properties (including liveness and safety) and their formal verification;
• Interface compliance (interface-to-interface and interface-to implementation) and contractual use of components;
• Modelling formalisms for concurrent enterprise systems assembled of components;
• Automatic or semi-automatic model generation and model-to-model transformations;
• Approaches for correctness by construction, and component composition frameworks;
• Techniques for prediction and formal verification of system properties, static and dynamic analysis;
• Instrumentation and monitoring approaches, runtime management of applications.

Submissions concentrating on specification techniques should involve an evaluation of the practical merit of their research and clearly state the analysis and reasoning techniques they enable. We also appreciate work of a formal nature with immediate value to the industrial context. We encourage not only mature research results, submissions presenting innovative ideas and early results are also of interest.

Two kinds of submissions are considered:

• regular papers (up to 15 pages) presenting original and unpublished work related to the workshop topics, and
• tool demonstration papers (up to 5 pages) presenting and highlighting the distinguishing features of a topic-related tool (co-developed by the authors).

The papers should be written in English, follow the ENTCS style, and respect the page limit. In case of necessity, the authors may request for extension of the page limit via email including the clarification and abstract of the paper. Papers are to be submitted via the EasyChair conference system, and need to be registered before submission (authors, title, abstract, keywords). All accepted papers are required to be presented at the workshop by one of the authors.

Final versions of accepted regular papers will be published in a special issue of the Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS). The tool demonstration papers will not appear in the ENTCS proceedings. However, all papers (both regular and tool demonstration papers) will be included in the pre-proceedings of the workshop, which will be printed and distributed among participants at the workshop.

Raffaela Mirandola (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Title: Model-based Quality Prediction for Service-Oriented Applications
Abstract: Models can help software engineers to reason about design-time decisions before implementing a system. In particular, for service-oriented applications, models can support the early QoS assessment of a service composition. This is an important issue since predicting the performance of general Internet distributed systems is extremely challenging. Through an early analysis of non-functional properties, such as performance and reliability, the software engineer can evaluate the impact of the different design choices or candidate system architectures. More generally, he may anticipate flaws that would otherwise percolate through the development process and lead to later costly corrective maintenance activities.
In this talk, we focus on models that may be used to reason about non-functional properties of the software-to-be. Furthermore, we deal with models that may be used for automatic verification of certain desired properties. In particular, we focus on properties such as reliability and performance, and on modeling approaches based on Discrete Time Markov Chains and on Queuing Networks Models.

• Barbora Zimmerova, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany & FZI, Germany
• Jens Happe, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany & FZI, Germany

Contact address: fesca09(at)ipd.uka.de, please include the keyword FESCA in the email subject.

Henrik Bohnenkamp (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
Juliana K.F. Bowles (University of St Andrews, UK)
Jeremy Bradley (Imperial College London, UK)
Ivana Cerna (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Kenneth Chan (King's College London, UK)
Martin Fraenzle (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Ludovic Henrio (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France)
Jan Kofron (FZI Research Center, Germany)
Samuel Kounev (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Heiko Koziolek (ABB Research Ladenburg, Germany)
Sotiris Moschoyiannis (University of Surrey, UK)
Julia Padberg (TU Berlin, Germany)
Frantisek Plasil (Charles Univerity, Czech Republic)
Iman Poernomo (King's College London, UK)
Antonino Sabetta (ISTI CNR Pisa, Italy)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)

PC co-chairs:
Jens Happe (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Ralf Reussner (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Barbora Zimmerova (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

The previous FESCA workshops at ETAPS 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 enjoyed high-quality submissions and attracted a number of recognized guest speakers, including Constance L. Heitmeyer (Naval Research Laboratory, USA), Manfred Broy, (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany), Jose Luiz Fiadeiro, (University of Leicester, UK), Frantisek Plasil (Charles University, Czech Republic) and Martin Wirsing (LMU, Germany). It is expected that FESCA at ETAPS 2009 will make an equally positive contribution.