Objectives

Workshop 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.

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:


Last modified December 1999.
Contact Howard Bowman if you have problems or comments.