by Maurice ter Beek
The yearly conference of the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems, FMICS, reached its 25th edition this year. A panel “Genesis, Success Stories, and the Next 25 Years” was organized to celebrate this remarkable milestone. The conference took place virtually on 2-3 September, hosted by TU Wien.
The aim of the FMICS conference series is to provide a forum for researchers interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. The conference was chaired by Maurice ter Beek (ISTI-CNR, Italy) and Dejan Ničković (AIT, Austria) and organized under the umbrella of QONFEST 2020 organized by Ezio Bartocci (TU Wien, Austria). FMICS attracted a record number of 149 participants from many countries worldwide. QONFEST attracted over 400 participants. A good number of 26 papers were submitted, of which eleven were accepted. The program included three keynote lectures, partially shared with the QONFEST conferences CONCUR, FORMATS and QEST, by Roderick Bloem (TU Graz, Austria), Thomas Henzinger (IST, Austria), and Stefan Resch (Thales, Austria).
Following a tradition, Springer provided an award for the best FMICS paper. This year, the reviewers selected the contribution “Verifiable and Scalable Mission-Plan Synthesis for Multiple Autonomous Agents” by Rong Gu, Eduard Enoiu, Cristina Seceleanu, and Kristina Lundqvist for the FMICS 2020 Best Paper Award. The panel celebrating the 25th anniversary of FMICS was a big success.The founders and previous chairpersons of the ERCIM WG FMICS acted as panelists. Diego Latella (ISTI-CNR) recalled the original motivation and beginning of FMICS, Stefania Gnesi (ISTI-CNR) shared some success stories, and Hubert Garavel (Inria) presented a study on the future of formal methods and their adoption in industry. The detailed report [1] of this study, included in the proceedings [2], presents an analysis of the opinions of 130 renowned experts in formal methods, as well as thought-provoking position statements on formal methods of 111 of them.
Link: https://fmics20.ait.ac.at/
References:
[1] H. Garavel, M.H. ter Beek, and J. van de Pol: “The 2020 Expert Survey on Formal Methods”, in [2], pp. 3-69. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58298-2_1
[2] M.H. ter Beek and Dejan Ničković (eds.): “Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems: Proc. of FMICS’20”, Springer LNCS, 2020.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58298-2
Please contact:
Maurice ter Beek, ISTI-CNR, Italy,
