Call For Papers: 2018 Refinement Workshop, July 18th, 2018

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Affiliated with FM 2018 and part of FLoC 2018, Oxford, UK.

Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering: the process of developing a more detailed design or implementation from an abstract specification through a sequence of steps that maintain correctness with respect to the original specification. Refinement forms the foundation for verification in a range of application areas, including distributed and concurrent systems, cyber-physical systems, autonomous systems, and other safety-critical applications.

The aim of this BCS FACS Refinement Workshop is to bring together people who are interested in the development of more concrete designs or executable programs from abstract specifications using formal notations, tool support for formal software development, and practical experience with formal refinement methodologies.

The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, and discussion of common ground and key differences. Topics of interest include:

Simulation techniques
Foundations and semantics
Case studies (specification and verification)
Compositional and modular reasoning
Object-orientation
Time, probability and hybrid systems
Specification notations
Programming models
Verification and tool support
Refinement and testing

Proceedings

Papers are fully refereed prior to the workshop will be published in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS), an open-access publisher.

It is anticipated that selected papers from this workshop will be published in extended versions in a special edition of a major international journal, in line with the special issues in FACJ and SCP that have appeared for workshop editions since 2003.

Key dates

Paper submission: April 23rd, 2018
Notification: May 15th, 2018
Workshop: July 18th, 2018

Submission

Accepted papers will need to use the EPTCS format, see EPTCS info for authors. Papers should be no more than 16 pages.

Submissions can be made via EasyChair.

Invited speaker

Ahmed Bouajjani
University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7)

Abstract: TBD

Workshop organisers

John Derrick, University of Sheffield, UK
Brijesh Dongol, Brunel University London, UK
Steve Reeves, University of Waikato, NZ

Program committee

John Derrick, University of Sheffield, UK (co-chair)
Brijesh Dongol, Brunel University London, UK (co-chair)
Steve Reeves, University of Waikato, NZ (co-chair)
Bernhard Aichernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Richard Banach, University of Manchester, UK
Luis Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
Eerke Boiten, De Montfort University, UK
Ana Cavalcanti, University of York, UK
Lindsay Groves, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
Rob Hierons, Brunel University London, UK
Marcel Oliveira, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Gerhard Schellhorn, Augsburg University, Germany
Steve Schneider, University of Surrey, UK
Emil Sekerinski, McMaster University, Canada
Graeme Smith, University of Queensland, Australia
Helen Treharne, University of Surrey, UK
Heike Wehrheim, University of Paderborn, Germany

History of the workshop

This is the 18th Refinement Workshop and would continue a long tradition in refinement workshops run under the auspices of the British Computer Society (BCS) FACS special interest group. Running since 1988, previous refinement workshops have been held at Cambridge, London, Bath etc.

In 1998 the BCS refinement workshop was combined with the Australasian Refinement Workshop to form the International Refinement Workshop, hosted alongside Formal Methods Pacific 1998 at The Australian National University. In 2002, the Refinement Workshop was held as an FME workshop in Copenhagen. This and six subsequent editions (Surrey, Macau, Oxford, Turku, Eindhoven, Limerick) have had proceedings in ENTCS or EPTCS and a subsequent journal special issue (most in Formal Aspects of Computing, one in Science of Computer Programming).

The workshop has been co-located at a number of different conferences in its history, most recently at FM in 2015 (Norway), iFM in 2013 (Pisa) and FM2011 (Limerick).