• May 09, 2013: FESCA'12 proceedings published by Elsevier in ENTCS
• Feb 05, 2012: FESCA'12 programme is now available below
• Jan 23, 2012: Michal Malohlava accepted the invitation to give a tool tutorial at FESCA'12
• Oct 31, 2011: The ENTCS macro for FESCA'12 submissions is now available at http://www.entcs.org/files/etaps12/fesca/prentcsmacro.sty
• Oct 28, 2011: EasyChair submission site is now open for 
  • paper registration (entering authors, title, abstract and keywords, 
    due December 02, 2011) and
  • paper submission (adding PDF to registered papers, 
    due December 09, 2011)
• Oct 24, 2011: Samuel Kounev accepted the invitation to give a keynote talk at FESCA'12
• May 04, 2011: FESCA'12 website was launched
• May 02, 2011: Lucia Kapová and Jan Kofroň accepted the invitation to become FESCA PC co-chairs and co-organizers

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 quality properties (e.g. 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 applications. In this context, the following topics are of particular concern:

• Architecture as a language: Building Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs)
  
  • Modelling formalisms for the analysis of concurrent, embeded or model-driven systems assembled of components;
  • Modelling formalisms in prediction, analysis and measurement of software quality attributes such as reliability, performance, or security;
• Properties of component-based models
  
  • Temporal properties (including liveness and safety) and their formal verification;
  • Interface compliance (interface-to-interface and interface-to implementation) and contractual use of components;
• Formal methods in Component-Based Software Development
  • 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;
• Formal methods in Model-Driven Software Development
  • Abstraction level in modelling formalisms;
  • Safer MDA through integration with formal methods;
  • Correctness of model transformations;
• 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.

Three kinds of submissions are considered:

• regular papers (up to 15 pages) presenting original and unpublished work related to the workshop topics,
• position papers (up to 10 pages) presenting ideas and directions of interesting ongoing and yet unpublished research 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'12 macro), and respect the page limit. 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 and position 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.

• Paper registration: December 9, 2011
• Submission deadline: December 15, 2011
• Notification of acceptance: January 20, 2012
• Final versions due: February 3, 2012
• Workshop date: March 31, 2012

Samuel Kounev (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Title: Modeling of Event-based Communication in Component-based Architectures: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Abstract: The event-driven communication paradigm is used increasingly often to build loosely-coupled distributed systems in many industry domains including telecommunications, transportation, supply chain management, and financial services. However, the loose coupling of components in such systems makes it hard for developers to predict their run-time behavior and quality attributes, e.g., performance, availability and reliability, at system design time. Most general purpose modeling formalisms for evaluating quality aspects of component-based architectures provide limited support for event-driven communication.

In the first part of the talk, a review of the state-of-the-art on approaches to integrating event-based communication in component-based architecture models will be presented. A set of generic abstractions enabling the modeling of events and event-based interactions as first class entities in component-based system architectures will be introduced. It will be shown how the proposed modeling abstractions can be used to extend an arbitrary architecture description language (ADL) to support event-based communication. The process will be illustrated in the context of the Palladio Component Model (PCM) and the Palladio software quality prediction framework.

In the second part of the talk, an extensive evaluation will be presented demonstrating the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed modeling abstractions  in the context of two representative case studies, the first one considering a real-life traffic monitoring system, the second one considering a novel RFID-based supply chain management application. The expressiveness and accuracy of the modeling approach are evaluated in a number of different workload and configuration scenarios. The results demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed modeling abstractions.

Finally, the talk will be concluded with an outlook on future research directions in the area of event-based communication and component-based architectures.

Michal Malohlava (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Title: SOFA 2 Component Framework and Its Ecosystem

Abstract: Component-based development represents a common practice to assemble various kinds of systems using well-defined building blocks -- components.

SOFA 2 is a advanced component framework offering features like hierarchical architectures, multiple communication styles, behavior specification, etc. The SOFA 2 framework provides a well-defined development methodology based on rigorous component model, tool support, and transparent component distribution, deployment, and execution. Furthermore, SOFA 2 is suitable for development of systems for almost any domain. To allow this, SOFA 2 offers 'profiles', which extend the core of the framework to be suitable for particular domain. Currently, profiles for Java, Java ME and C-based systems exist, utilizing common development methodology and tooling.

This tutorial shows the SOFA 2 component framework and its ecosystem including various tools for architecture modeling, component implementation, deployment, and runtime monitoring. Furthermore, it
demonstrates development workflow stressing the advanced features of the used component model.

• Barbora Bühnová, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Lucia Kapová, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Jan Kofroň, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Contact address: fesca2012(at)easychair.org, please include the keyword FESCA in the email subject.

Ivana Černá (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Jens Happe (SAP Research, Germany)
Ludovic Henrio (CNRS, France)
Holger Hermanns (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
Petr Hnetynka (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)
Samuel Kounev (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Heiko Koziolek (ABB Research Ladenburg, Germany)
Ralf Küsters (Universität Trier, Germany)
Markus Lumpe (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Raffaela Mirandola (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Dorina Petriu (Carleton Univesity, USA)
Ralf Reussner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Dennis Westermann (SAP Research, Germany)
Steffen Zschaler (King's College London, UK)

PC co-chairs:
Barbora Bühnová (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Lucia Kapová (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Jan Kofroň (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)

Please follow the information at ETAPS 2012 website.

The previous FESCA workshops at ETAPS 2004-2011 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), Rolf Hennicker (LMU, Munic, Germany) František Plášil (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) and Martin Wirsing (LMU, Munich, Germany). It is expected that FESCA 2012 will make an equally positive contribution.

• WCOP 2012: 17th International Doctoral Symposium on Components and Architectures
  Doctoral Symposium of CompArch 2012, Bertinoro, Italy, June 25, 2012
• FIT 2012: 4th International Workshop on Foundations of Interface Technologies
  Satelite event of ETAPS 2012, Tallinn, Estonia, March 25, 2012
• BX 2012: 1st International Workshop on Bidirectional Transformations
  Satelite event of ETAPS 2012, Tallinn, Estonia, March 25, 2012