FESCA @ ETAPS 2011

8th International Workshop on Formal Engineering approaches to Software Components and Architectures, Satellite event of ETAPS, held on 2nd April 2011, Saarbrücken, Germany

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

  • Dec 12, 2011: FESCA'11 proceedings published by Elsevier in ENTCS
  • Jan 26, 2011: Michael Hauck accepted the invitation to give a tool tutorial at FESCA'11
  • Dec 27, 2010: FESCA'11 duration was updated to a one-day event
  • Dec 22, 2009: Deadline for paper submission passed
  • Dec 07, 2010: FESCA deadlines have been extended!
    • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords,
      to December 17, 2010) and
    • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers,
      to December 21, 2010)
  • Dec 05, 2010: The ENTCS macro for FESCA'11 submissions is now available at http://www.entcs.org/files/etaps11/fesca/prentcsmacro.sty
  • Nov 03, 2010: EasyChair submission site is now open for
    • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords,
      due December 03, 2010) and
    • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers,
      due December 10, 2010)
  • Jul 26, 2010: Rolf Hennicker accepted the invitation to give a keynote talk at FESCA'11
  • Jul 21, 2010: FESCA'11 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 applications. In this context, the following topics are of particular concern:

  • Prediction, analysis and measurement of software quality attributes such as reliability, performance, or security;
  • 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 the analysis of concurrent systems assembled of components;
  • Techniques for prediction and formal verification of system properties, including static and dynamic analysis;
  • Instrumentation and monitoring approaches, runtime management of applications;
  • (Semi-) automatic inference of analytical models for existing software systems;
  • Industrial case studies and experience reports.

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 ENTCS style files and FESCA'11 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, but will be included in the electronic pre-proceedings (distributed at the workhop) and made available on the workshop website.

Dates

  • Paper registration: December 17, 2010
  • Submission deadline: December 21, 2010
  • Notification of acceptance: January 26, 2011
  • Final versions due: February 7, 2011
  • Workshop date: April 2, 2011

Invited Speaker

Rolf Hennicker (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Title: Interface Coherence of Reactive Software Components: Solutions and Challenges
Abstract: Interface coherence is a key issue in component-based software development. It concerns two dimensions of the development process: component implementations should adhere to their interface specifications - and - components should be composed only if their interfaces are compatible. To achieve independent implementability it is essential that both dimensions work properly together, i.e. that compatibility is preserved by refinement and refinement is preserved by composition, which are crucial requirements for any kind of interface theory. This talk analyses solutions and challenges derived from various interface theories based on state transition specifications with input/output-actions (e.g. interface automata, modal I/O-transition systems and open Petri nets). Criteria for the analysis shall be the communication style (synchronous, asynchronous), expressiveness (observational abstraction, treatment of data), decidability of refinement and/or compatibility, as well as semantic soundness and completeness.

Tutorial

Michael Hauck (FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany)
Title: Model-driven Performance Engineering with the Palladio Component Model
Abstract: The Palladio Component Model (PCM) has been developed over the last 6 years. Today it is a mature modeling language for modeling component-based or service-oriented software systems with a special focus on predicting extra-functional properties of the system based on its constituting components. The PCM highly relies on model-driven software development techniques for this and uses automated transformations into well-known prediction models or simulation systems. It is supported by a mature, industry proven tool set based on the Eclipse platform.
The tutorial consists of two parts. The first part presents the PCM's foundational ideas from the area of component-based or service-oriented software development, its analysis capabilities, and possible extension points. The tutorial presents components in different phases of their life-cycle, and discusses the PCM's understanding of a typical component-based software development process and the developer roles involved into it. Then it focuses on performance prediction and the annotations necessary for this. The second part of the tutorial introduces the PCM's tool set and shows how to use it to create and analyze PCM models. 

Workshop Programme

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

Rolf Hennicker
Interface Coherence of Reactive Software Components: Solutions and Challenges
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Session I.

Premek Brada
Enhanced Type-based Component Compatibility Using Deployment Context Information

Arnaud Lanoix, Julien Dormoy and Olga Kouchnarenko
Combining Proof and Model-checking to Validate Reconfigurable Architectures


Erik Burger and Ralf Reussner
Performance Certification of Software Components
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Session II.

Galina Besova, Heike Wehrheim and Annika Wagner
Reputation-based reliability prediction of service compositions  

Jaroslav Šnajberk and Premek Brada
ENT: A Generic Meta-Model for the Description of Component-Based Applications  
15:00-16:00
Tutorial (part I.)

Michael Hauck
Model-driven Performance Engineering with the Palladio Component
Model (part I. - Foundations and approach)
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30-17:15 Tutorial (part II.)

Michael Hauck
Model-driven Performance Engineering with the Palladio Component
Model (part II. - Tool set demonstration)
17:15-17:30 Workshop closing

Organizing Committee

Contact address: fesca2011(at)easychair.org, please include the keyword FESCA in the email subject.

Programme Committee

Jeremy Bradley (Imperial College London, UK)
Ivana Černá (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Martin Fränzle (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
Lars Grunske (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Ludovic Henrio (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France)
Holger Hermanns (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
Jan Kofroň (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Samuel Kounev (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Heiko Koziolek (ABB Research Ladenburg, Germany)
Ralf Küsters (Universität Trier, Germany)
Markus Lumpe (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Florian Matthes (Technische Universität München, Germany)
Raffaela Mirandola (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Iman Poernomo (King's College London, UK)
Ralf Reussner (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Antonino Sabetta (SAP Research, France)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)

PC co-chairs:
Barbora Bühnová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Jens Happe (SAP Research, Germany)

Registration and Travelling

Please follow the information at ETAPS 2011 website.

Previous FESCA Workshops

The previous FESCA workshops at ETAPS 2004-2010 enjoyed high-quality submissions and attracted a number of recognized guest speakers, including Manfred Broy (Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany), Ivana Černá (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), José Luiz Fiadeiro, (University of Leicester, UK), Constance L. Heitmeyer (Naval Research Laboratory, USA), František Plášil (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and Martin Wirsing (LMU, Munich, Germany). It is expected that FESCA 2011 will make an equally positive contribution.