FORMATS 2018 - 16th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems

Control and analysis of the timing of computations is crucial to many domains of system engineering, be it, e. g., for ensuring timely response to stimuli originating in an uncooperative environment, or for synchronising components in VLSI. Reflecting this broad scope, timing aspects of systems from a variety of domains have been treated independently by different communities in computer science and control. Researchers interested in semantics, verification and performance analysis study models such as timed automata and timed Petri nets, the digital design community focuses on propagation and switching delays, while designers of embedded controllers have to take account of the time taken by controllers to compute their responses after sampling the environment, as well as of the dynamics of the controlled process during this span.
Timing-related questions in these separate disciplines do have their particularities. However, there is a growing awareness that there are basic problems (of both scientific and engineering level) that are common to all of them. In particular, all these sub-disciplines treat systems whose behaviour depends upon combinations of logical and temporal constraints; namely, constraints on the temporal distances between occurrences of successive events. Often, these constraints cannot be separated, as the intrinsic dynamics of processes couples them, necessitating models, methods, and tools facilitating their combined analysis. Reflecting this, FORMATS 2018 promotes submissions on hybrid discrete-continuous systems, and will promote a special session on this topic.
The aim of FORMATS is to promote the study of fundamental and practical aspects of timed systems, and to bring together researchers from different disciplines that share interests in modelling and analysis of timed systems and, as a generalisation, of hybrid systems. Typical topics include (but are not limited to):
Foundations and Semantics:
Theoretical foundations of timed systems and languages; new models and logics for analysis and comparison of existing models (like automata, Petri nets, max-plus models, network calculus, or process algebras involving quantitative time; hybrid automata; probabilistic automata and logics).
Methods and Tools:
Techniques, algorithms, data structures, and software tools for verification, synthesis, learning, online monitoring and runtime verification of timed or hybrid systems and for resolving temporal constraints (scheduling, worst-case execution time analysis, optimisation, model checking, testing, constraint solving).
Applications:
Adaptation and specialisation of timing technology in application domains in which timing plays an important role (real-time software, embedded control, hardware circuits, biological systems, and problems of scheduling in manufacturing and telecommunications).