Workshop on
Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems
(MARS 2015)
 

Logics and techniques for automated reasoning have often been developed with formal analysis and formal verification in mind. To show applicability, toy examples or tiny case studies are typically presented in research papers. Since the theory needs to be developed first, this approach is reasonable.
However, to show that a developed approach actually scales to real systems, large case studies are essential. The development of formal models of real systems usually requires a perfect understanding of informal descriptions of the system—sometimes found in RFCs or other standard documents—which are usually just written in English. Based on the type of system, an adequate specification formalism needs to be chosen, and the informal specification translated into it. Abstraction from unimportant details then yields an accurate, formal model of the real system.
The process of developing a detailed and accurate model usually takes a large amount of time, often months or years; without even starting a formal analysis. When publishing the results on a formal analysis in a scientific paper, details of the model have to be skipped due to lack of space, and often the lessons learnt from modelling are not discussed since they are not the main focus of the paper.
The workshop aims at discussing exactly these unmentioned lessons.
Examples are:

• Which formalism is chosen, and why?
• Which abstractions have to be made and why?
• How are 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?

The workshop emphasises modelling over verification. In particular, we invite papers that present full Models of Real Systems, which may lay the basis for future formal analysis. The workshop will bring together researchers from different communities that all aim at verifying real systems and are developing formal models for such systems. Areas where large models often occur are within networks, (trustworthy) systems and software verification (from byte code up to programming- and specification languages). An aim of the workshop is to present different modelling approaches and discuss pros and cons for each of them.

Both registration and the workshop will take place at the Japanese-Pacific ICT Centre (Level 3).
 

8:30-9:00	Registration (LPAR and workshop)
9:00-9:15	Opening
9:15-10:00	Formal Specification and Verification of Fully Asynchronous Implementations of the Data Encryption Standard Wendelin Serwe
10:00-10:30	Coffee Break
10:30-12:00	Specifying a Realistic File System Sidney Amani, Toby Murray
	Controlled Owicki-Gries Concurrency: Reasoning about the Preemptible eChronos Embedded Operating System June Andronick, Corey Lewis, Carroll Morgan
12:00-14:00	Lunch Break
14:00-15:30	On the Control of Self-Balancing Unicycles Felix Freiberger, Holger Hermanns
	Timed Automata for Modelling Caches and Pipelines Franck Cassez, Pablo González de Aledo Marugán
15:30-16:00	Coffee Break
16:00-17:00	Modeling and Verification of the Bitcoin Protocol Kaylash Chaudhary, Ansgar Fehnker, Jaco van de Pol, Marielle Stoelinga
	Closing
18:00-	Informal Workshop Dinner (pay your own)

The proceedings for this workshop are published in the open access series Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). They can be found at http://eptcs.web.cse.unsw.edu.au/content.cgi?MARS2015.

Submissions must be unpublished and not be submitted for publication elsewhere. Contributions are limited to 8 pages EPTCS style (not counting the appendix), but shorter extended abstracts are welcome. Appendices (of arbitrary length) can be used to present all details of a formalised model; the appendices will be part of the proceedings. Submissions must be in English and submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. All submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three referees based on their novelty, relevance and technical merit. The proceedings will be published as part of the open access series Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS).

Submission of abstracts:	Monday 24 August 2015
Submission:	Monday 31 August 2015
Notification:	Friday 9 October 2015
Final version:	Monday 2 November 2015
Workshop:	Monday 23 November 2015

As mentioned above, we invite papers that present full Models of Real Systems, which may lay the basis for future formal analysis. The full Call for Papers can be found here.

Rance Cleaveland	(University of Maryland, USA)
Hubert Garavel	(INRIA, France)
Rob van Glabbeek	(NICTA, Australia)
Jan Friso Groote	(Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
He Jifeng	(East China Normal University, China)
Holger Hermanns	(Saarland University, Germany)
Peter Höfner	(NICTA, Australia)
Gerard Holzmann	(NASA/JPL, USA)
Magnus Myreen	(Chalmers University, Sweden)
Viet Yen Nguyen	(Fraunhofer IESE, Germany)
Bill Roscoe	(University of Oxford, UK)
Pamela Zave	(AT&T Laboratories, USA)

The workshop is co-located with the 20th International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR 20). Information about venue and travelling in/to Fiji can be found at the webpage of LPAR.

 webmaster@mars-workshop.org
 

Rob van Glabbeek	Jan Friso Groote	Peter Höfner
NICTA Locked Bag 6016 Sydney, NSW 1466 Australia	Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands	NICTA Locked Bag 6016 Sydney, NSW 1466 Australia