7th Workshop on
Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems
(MARS 2026)

The MARS workshops bring together researchers from different communities who are developing formal models of real systems in areas where complex models occur, such as networks, cyber-physical systems, hardware/software codesign, biology, etc. The motivation and aim for MARS stem from the following two observations:

• Large case studies are essential to show that specification formalisms and modelling techniques are applicable to real systems, whereas many research papers only consider toy examples or tiny case studies.
• Developing an accurate model of a real system takes a large amount of time, often months or years. In most scientific papers, however, salient details of the model need to be skipped due to lack of space, and to leave room for formal verification methodologies and results.

The MARS workshops aim at remedying these issues, emphasising modelling over verification, so as to retain lessons learnt from formal modelling, which are not usually discussed elsewhere. Examples are:

• Which formalism was chosen, and why?
• Which abstractions have been made, and why?
• How were important characteristics of the system modelled?
• Were there any complications while modelling the system?
• Which measures were taken to guarantee the accuracy of the model?
• How can different modelling approaches be compared on this system?

We thus invite papers that present formal models of real systems, which may lay the basis for future analysis and comparison.

In addition to the workshop proceedings, the formal models presented at the workshop will be archived in the MARS Repository, a growing, diverse collection of realistic benchmarks. The existence of this repository is a unique feature that makes MARS contributions available to the wider community, so that others can reproduce experiments, perform further analyses, and try the same case studies using different formal methods.

Submission:	Monday, January 21, 2026
Notification:	Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Final version:	Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Workshop:	Sunday, April 12, 2026 (as part of ETAPS 2026)

As mentioned above, we invite papers that present full models of real systems, which may lay the basis for future formal analysis. The full CFP can be found here.

MARS 2026 is part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2026). Information about venue and travelling in/to Italy can be found at the webpage of ETAPS.

All questions about the workshop should be emailed to the PC chairs Gregor Gössler and Maurice ter Beek at mars2026@mars-workshop.org