Component-based software development is a paradigm that has been proposing sound engineering principles and techniques for coping with the complexity of software-intensive systems. However, many challenging conceptual and technological issues remain that require further research.
Moreover, the advent of service-oriented and cloud computing has brought to the fore new dimensions, such as quality of service and robustness to withstand inevitable faults, which require established concepts to be revisited and new ones to be developed in order to meet the opportunities offered by those architectures. As software applications become themselves components of wider socio-technical systems, further challenges arise from the need to create and manage interactions, which can evolve in time and space, and rely on the use of resources that can change in non-computable ways.
FACS 2015 is concerned with how formal methods can be used to make component-based development fit for the new architectures of today and the systems that are now pervading the socio-economic world. Formal methods have provided foundations for component-based software through research on mathematical models for components, composition and adaptation, and rigorous approaches to verification, deployment, testing, and certification. Whilst those avenues still need to be further explored, time is also ripe to bring new techniques to the fore, such as those based on stochastic models and simulation.
The conference seeks to address the development and application of formal methods in all aspects of software components and services. Specific topics include, but are not limited to:
- formal models for software components and their interaction
- formal aspects of services, service oriented architectures, business processes, cloud computing, ensembles, or similar programming artifacts
- design and verification methods for software components and services
- composition and deployment: models, calculi, languages
- formal methods and modeling languages for components and services
- model based and GUI based testing of components and services
- models for QoS and other extra-functional properties (e.g., trust, compliance, security) of components and services
- components for real-time, safety-critical, secure, and/or embedded systems
- stochastic techniques for modelling and verification
- simulation techniques for complex networks of interacting components
- industrial or experience reports, and case studies
- update and reconfiguration of component and service architectures
- component systems evolution and maintenance
- autonomic components and self-managed applications
- formal and rigorous approaches to software adaptation and self-adaptive systems
- tools supporting the formal methods for components and services
