FESCA @ ETAPS 2010

7th International Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches to Software Components and Architectures, Satellite event of ETAPS, held on 27th March 2010, Paphos, Cyprus

The aim of the FESCA workshop is to bring together both young and senior researchers from formal methods, software engineering, and industry interested in the development and application of formal modelling approaches as well as associated analysis and reasoning techniques with practical benefits for component-based software engineering.

Announcements

  • Aug 10, 2010: FESCA'10 post-proceedings published by Elsevier in ENTCS
  • Feb 02, 2010: Workshop programme is now available
  • Jan 27, 2010: EasyChair system is now open for camera-ready submissions (a zip file containing all the sources and the final pdf)
  • Jan 25, 2010: FESCA'10 duration was updated to a one-day event
  • Dec 16, 2009: Deadline for paper submission passed
  • Nov 18, 2009: FESCA'10 supported by the HotelsCombined™ - International Conference Support Program (see the information at the bottom of the page)
  • Nov 15, 2009: EasyChair submission site is now open for
    • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords,
      due December 07, 2009) and
    • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers,
      due December 15, 2009)
  • Sep 30, 2009: The ENTCS macro for FESCA'10 submissions is now available at http://www.entcs.org/files/etaps10/fesca/prentcsmacro.sty
  • Sep 25, 2009: Ivana Cerna accepted the invitation to give a keynote talk at FESCA'10
  • Sep 14, 2009: FESCA'10 Call for Papers (CfP) is now available
  • Sep 01, 2009: FESCA'10 website was launched

Workshop Aim

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.

Workshop Topics

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.

Submission Guidelines

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 (using FESCA'10 macro), 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.

Proceedings

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.

Dates

  • Paper registration: December 07, 2009
  • Submission deadline: December 15, 2009
  • Notification of acceptance: January 27, 2010
  • Final versions due: February 15, 2010
  • Workshop date: March 27, 2010

Invited Speaker

Ivana Cerna (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Title: Formal Verification of Component-based Architectures - Motivation, Methods & Challenges
Abstract: Component-based software engineering addresses the issue of building large systems by combining existing and new components. Establishing the correctness of such systems is a challenging concern. Among the formal analysis necessary to ensure the global correctness, the component interaction arises as one of the key problems. Over the years, various mechanisms have been proposed to tackle this problem.
In this talk, we focus on automata-based components and interactions specifications. This approach provides an elegant framework to capture and automatically verify the interactive behavior of component-based systems. We deal with all the aspects of the verification process starting with system modelling and property specification through verification methods to the interpretation of resulting observations.

Workshop Programme

08:30-09:00 Registration
09:00-09:20 Workshop opening
09:20-10:30 Invited talk

Ivana Cerna
Formal Verification of Component-based Architectures - Motivation, Methods & Challenges
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Session I.

Philip Mayer, Andreas Schroeder and Sebastian Bauer
A Strict-Observational Interface Theory for Analysing Service Orchestrations [slides]

Pascal André, Gilles Ardourel, Christian Attiogbé and Arnaud Lanoix
Contract-based Verification of Kmelia Component Assemblies using Event-B

Matias Lee and Pedro D'Argenio
Describing Secure Interfaces with Interface Automata [slides]
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:00 Session II.

Javier Cámara, José Antonio Martín, Gwen Salaün, Carlos Canal and Ernesto Pimentel
Semi-automatic Specification of Behavioural Service Adaptation Contracts [slides]

Muhammad Uzair Khan and Ludovic Henrio
Asynchronous Components with Futures: Semantics and Proofs in Isabelle/HOL [slides]

Kamil Jezek, Premek Brada and Petr Stepan
Towards Context Independent Extra-functional Properties Descriptor for Components [slides]

Lucia Kapova and Steffen Becker
Systematic Refinement of Performance Models for Concurrent Software Systems [slides]
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:50 Session III.

Franz Brosch, Ralf Gitzel, Heiko Koziolek and Simone Krug
Combining Architecture-based Software Reliability Predictions with Financial Impact Calculations

Ioan Lazar, Simona Motogna and Bazil Parv
Behaviour-Driven Development of Foundational UML Components [slides]

Behnaz Changizi, Natallia Kokash and Farhad Arbab
A unified toolset for business process model formalization
17:50-18:00 Workshop closing
19:30-22:30 Joint Workshops Dinner

Paid extra in registration, 50 EUR per ticket
See ETAPS 2010 website for more information

Organizing Committee

Contact address: fesca2010(at)easychair.org, please include the keyword FESCA in the email subject.

Programme Committee

Henrik Bohnenkamp (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
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)
Lars Grunske (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Ludovic Henrio (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France)
Holger Hermanns (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
Jan Kofron (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Samuel Kounev (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Heiko Koziolek (ABB Research Ladenburg, Germany)
Markus Lumpe (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Raffaela Mirandola (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Sotiris Moschoyiannis (University of Surrey, UK)
Iman Poernomo (King's College London, UK)
Ralf Reussner (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Antonino Sabetta (ISTI CNR Pisa, Italy)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)

PC co-chairs:
Barbora Buhnova (Zimmerova) (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Jens Happe (FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Germany)

Registration and Travelling

Please follow the information at ETAPS 2010 website.

Acommodation

You can either follow the suggestions of ETAPS 2010 website, or use the following special offer of HotelsCombined™:

HotelsCombined™ - International Conference Support Program

You’ll find a variety of accommodation options in Paphos. HotelsCombined.com provides an accommodation price comparison search engine and is offering a 10% rebate to all participants attending FESCA 2010.

Previous FESCA Workshops

The previous FESCA workshops at ETAPS 2004, 2005, 2006, 20072008 and 2009 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 2010 will make an equally positive contribution.