Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems
by Stefania Gnesi and Diego Latella
Formal Methods has been advocated as a means of increasing the reliability of systems, especially those which are safety or business critical, but the industrial uptake of such methods has been slow. This is due to the perceived difficulty of a mathematical nature of these methods, the lack of tool support, and the unavailability of precedents where formal methods have been proven to be effective. It is even more difficult to develop automatic specification and verification tools due to limitations like state explosion, undecidability, etc. This working group was created to bring together researchers mainly, but not exclusively, from the ERCIM consortium in order to promote the use of formal methods within industry.Since the inception of the working group in 1996, two workshops were organized to exchange experience in the industrial usage of formal methods and to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools with respect to their usage in industry. The first was held at St. Hugh's College in Oxford in March 1996 (see ERCIM News 26, page 46), a selection of the papers presented at this meeting will be published in a special issue of the International Journal on Formal Methods for Systems Design (Kluwer). The second took place at the University of Cesena, 4-5 July 1997.
Second ERCIM International Workshop and Meeting on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems
This workshop was organized as a satellite meeting of the 24th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming ICALP 97. Approximately 25 people attended the workshop, which was chaired by Stefania Gnesi of IEI-CNR, Italy. There were four invited speakers:
- Pim Kars Utopics BV: Formal Methods in the Design of a Storm Surge Barrier Control System
- Ulrich Herzog Univ. of Erlangen-Nürnberg: Stochastic Process Algebras for Qualitative Assurance
- Raffaele Mazzeo - SASIB Railways S.p.A.: Vital Processor Interlocking: A Case Study of Utilisation of Formal Methods for all the Design Phases
- Giorigio Mongardi ANSALDO-Trasporti: Formal Methods for Raylway Signalling Applications: rationale and case studies.
Please contact:
Stefania Gnesi - IEI-CNR
Tel: +39 50 593489
E-mail: gnesi@iei.pi.cnr.itDiego Latella - CNUCE-CNR
Tel: +39 50 593230
E-mail: latella@cnuce.cnr.it