CREST 2016 - 1st Workshop on Causal-based Reasoning for Embedded and safety-critical Systems Technologies

Today’s IT systems, and the interactions among them, become more and more complex. Power grid blackouts, airplane crashes, failures of medical devices, cruise control devices out of control are just a few examples of incidents due to component failures and unexpected interactions of subsystems under conditions that have not been anticipated during system design and testing. The failure of one component may entail a cascade of failures in other components; several components may also fail independently. In such cases, determining the root cause(s) of a system-level failure and elucidating the exact scenario that led to the failure is today a complex and tedious task that requires significant expertise. In the security domain, localizing instructions and tracking agents
responsible for information leakage is a central problem.
Formal approaches for automated causality analysis, fault localization, explanation of events, accountability and blaming have been proposed independently by several communities ? in particular, AI, concurrency, model-based diagnosis, formal methods. Work on these topics has significantly gained speed during the last years.
The goals of this workshop are to bring together and foster exchange between researchers from the different communities, and to present and discuss recent advances and new ideas in the field.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
formal models of causal systems and structures
languages and logics for specification and causal analysis
definitions of causality and explanation
causality analysis on models, programs, and/or traces
fault localization
fault ascription and blaming
accountability
applications, implementations, and case studies of the above