Call for Papers
FM-ELSEWHERE
(FORMAL METHODS *ELSEWHERE*)
A Satellite Workshop of FORTE-PSTV-2000,
devoted to applications of Formal Methods to any area
*other than* communication protocols and software engineering.
Pisa, October 10, 2000
Formal specification languages have been designed to support the
description of system structure and behaviour in terms of concepts such as
event occurrence, observation and experiment, temporal ordering, causality,
cooperation and synchronisation among entities, non determinism,
concurrency and parallelism, state changes and invariants, and others.
While considerable experience has been gained in the application of formal
methods to the areas for which they were initially conceived, the
high abstraction level of these concepts suggests that they could play
an important role in several other disciplines such as chemistry, biology,
physics and even arts, humanites and social sciences.
After two decades of 'traditional' applications, during which the initial
gap between the excessive optimism of academic supporters and the
skepticism of industrial detractors have been substantially reduced, often
leading to a positive and constructive attitude towards their adoption,
formal methods are perhaps ready to spread out of their native territory
and, at the turn of the decade and millenium, invade new exciting areas of
research, thus providing a much wider exploitation of the huge intellectual
investment behind their definition. In fact, it is often the case that
a technique designed with a particular application in mind, turns out to
perform better and to be more useful in a context other than the originally
intended one.
The FM-ELSEWHERE workshop, co-located with FORTE-PSTV-2000 at Pisa, will
be a forum for researchers who are interested in the application of
formal methods, as identified above, to virtually any area of research,
except communication protocols and software engineering.
Topics of interest include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:
Also, we will be keeping a list of known non-traditional applications of
formal methods on
the workshop web page and if you wish to contribute
an item to the list mail
Howard Bowman.
We also plan to keep a Web page, linked to the FORTE/PSTV 2000 Web site,
with pointers to pages that deal with 'non-traditional' applications of
Formal Methods.
Last modified December 1999.
OBJECTIVES
A wide variety of formal models, languages and methods have been developed
in the last two decades for supporting the specification, design,
verification, implementation and testing of computer networks and
distributed software systems. These include CCS, pi-calculus, timed and
stochastic process algebra, VDM, Z, B, Automata and Timed Automata, Petri
Nets, Statecharts, Logics, TLA, Message Sequence Charts, ADT's, OBJ, Larch,
formal Object-Oriented approaches, the international standards Estelle,
LOTOS, SDL, ASN.1 and TTCN, and others.
If you are interested to submit but are not sure whether your
application of formal methods is sufficiently strange, you can
mail Howard Bowman to see
whether it passes the "unusualness" criteria.
ORGANISERS
SUBMISSIONS
Send by e-mail a copy of your paper to
Howard Bowman.
A light-weight review process will be employed. Electronic publication of
the workshop contributions is being investigated.
A 'Most Bizarre FM-Application' Award (of the symbolic value
of one Euro) will be assigned to the authors of the paper that
best matches the spirit of the Workshop -- one of combining
technical soundness with extreme application originality.
Please e-mail any relevant URL's to
Howard Bowman.
Contact Howard Bowman if you have
problems or comments.