WS-FM:FASOCC 2014 - 11th International Workshop on Web Services and Formal Methods: Formal Aspects of Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has been established as a major paradigm for system development, revolving around functional and autonomous building blocks that are available over the Internet and independent of platforms and programming languages. To support the SOC paradigm, infrastructures provide standard mechanisms and protocols for describing, locating and invoking services.
Cloud computing has seen a remarkable uptake and facilitates distributed computing based on virtualization. Here, abstractions centred on services, such as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service, enable dynamic sharing of resources and allow for tailoring service delivery to clients’ needs. As such, cloud computing provides a backbone for more effective and efficient service-oriented computing.
Formal methods can play a fundamental role in research on SOC, cloud computing, and their interplay. They can help us to define unambiguous semantics for the languages and protocols that underpin existing Web service infrastructures, and provide a basis for checking the conformance and compliance of bundled services. They can also empower dynamic discovery and binding with compatibility checks against behavioural properties and quality of service requirements. Formal analysis of security properties and performance is essential in cloud computing and in application areas including e-science, e-commerce, workflow, and business process management. Formal models further enable linking service abstractions to event-driven, reactive middle-ware and execution infrastructures. Moreover, the challenges raised by this area can offer opportunities for extending the state of the art in formal techniques.
The aim of the WS-FM:FASOCC workshop series is to bring together researchers working on SOC, cloud computing, and formal methods in order to catalyse fruitful collaboration. The scope of the workshop is not only limited to technological aspects. In fact, the workshop series has a strong tradition of attracting submissions on formal approaches to enterprise systems modelling in general, and business process modelling in particular. Potentially, this could have a significant impact on the ongoing standardization efforts for SOC and cloud computing technologies.