FM'99: World Congress on Formal Methods

20-24 September 1999

Toulouse, France

Sponsored by ACM, AMAST, EATCS, ETAPS, EU, FME, IEEE CS, IFIP, IPSJ

Technical Symposium: Call for Papers

The World Congress on Formal Methods (FM'99) is based on the following observations:

• Maturity: Formal methods are no longer a curiosity. In some organisations and in a growing number of industries they are or are striving to be an expected matter of practice.
• Convergence: The choice of a formal method or tool is no longer controversial: formal methods are chosen in relation to their purpose and they are increasingly used in effective combination.
• Progress: Benefit to the community is gained by the accumulated sets of models, theories, techniques, languages, tools, libraries, and case studies developed by scientists and engineers from around the world.

FM'99 will have four parallel activities: a Technical Symposium, a Tools Fair and Applications Forum, a set of User Group Meetings, and a set of Industry Tutorials.

The Technical Symposium will have invited speakers and regular sessions with presentations by authors of technical papers and experience reports. The invited speakers include: Prof C.A.R. Hoare, Michael Jackson, Dr Cliff Jones, Dr John Rushby, and Dr Joseph Sifakis.

The Technical Symposium for FM'99 recognises the increased application of formal methods in industry by having two major streams: Foundations and Methodology, and Industrial Applications.

Under Foundations and Methodology, we solicit submissions that cover all traditional technical areas of formal methods, including (but not exclusively):

• Fundamentals: Logics, models (temporal, concurrency, distribution), theories; specification, verification, refinement and analysis techniques.
• Languages and Tools: Notations, design calculi, model checkers, proof checkers, theorem proving, specification analysers, hybrid and synchronous languages, tools.
• Systems Application Areas: Hardware, concurrent and reactive systems, distributed and mobile computing, fault-tolerant and reliable systems, network protocols, real-time and hybrid systems.
• Systems Engineering: Combining formal and informal methods, domain and requirements engineering, software architecture, program organisation, formal techniques in object-oriented programming, testing, maintenance, software process and performance modelling.
• Education: Undergraduate, graduate, professional and industrial training, technology transfer.

Under Industrial Applications, we solicit submissions that focus primarily on the application of formal methods to a specific industrial domain, including (but not exclusively):

• Burgeoning Industries: bio-engineering, data mining, decision support systems.
• Finance: banking, securities industry (stocks, etc ).
• Hardware: VLSI, microprocessors, micro-instruments.
• Health-care.
• Human Computer Interface.
• Open Information Systems: WWW, OMG, ODP, etc
• Regulation and Law.
• Robotics.
• Safety: e.g., nuclear power.
• Security: confidentiality, privacy, authentication, electronic commerce.
• Telecommunications: mobile and wireless, networks, switching systems.
• Transport: e.g., avionics, railway, shipping, metropolitan transport.

For both streams we solicit technical papers. In addition, for the Industrial Applications stream we solicit experience reports. All submissions will be thoroughly refereed. Criteria for papers and reports will be different. Technical papers should present a new contribution to the field, e.g., a new analysis technique or the application of an existing method to a new domain. They should be written in a lucid and scholarly manner, including a comparison to related work. Experience reports need not present any novel idea; rather, they might describe a case study or industrial project where a formal method was applied in practice. They should clearly state the role formal methods played in the experiment, describe the significant details of the experiment, explain lessons learned, and report qualitative/quantitative results.

All papers should be no longer than 20 pages and authors should prepare their final version preferably using llncsdoc.sty. Instructions for authors are available at

ftp://trick.ntp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/instruct/authors/

The cover sheet must include (1) the title, (2) name, affiliation, and URL (if available) of each author, (3) e-mail, phone, and fax for the contact author, (4) for which stream (Foundations and Methodology or Industrial Applications) you would like your paper to be considered, and if for the Industrial Applications stream, whether your paper is a technical paper or experience report, and (5) either which sub-stream you would like your paper to considered or keywords drawn from the phrases used in the lists above.

Six hard-copies of each submission should be sent to and reach Dr James Woodcock by 14 February 1999. Only hardcopy submissions will be accepted; electronic submissions will be rejected out of hand.

The schedule for review is:

• 14 February 1999: Submissions of technical papers and experience reports due.
• 14 May 1999: Notice of acceptance.
• 14 July 1999: Final paper in camera-ready form due.