MARS 2015 - 2015 Workshop on Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems

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.