2nd Workshop on Methods and Tools for Rigorous System DesignMeTRiD 2019

MeTRiD 2019 is the second edition of the MeTRiD international workshop focusing on the theoretical foundations, tools and applications of the Rigorous System Design (RSD) approach.

The intrinsic concurrent nature of interactions among components of modern software systems is the root cause of their sheer complexity, making complete a posteriori verification practically infeasible. An alternative approach consists in ensuring correctness by construction.

The term Rigorous System Design (RSD) denotes the design approach that is based on a formal, accountable and iterative process for deriving trustworthy and optimised implementations from models of application software, its execution platform and its external environment. Ideally, a system implementation is derived from a set of appropriate high-level models by applying a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations, thereby as much as possible striving for achieving correctness by construction.

The goal of the workshop is to promote cross-fertilisation between theoretical research in academia and practical applications in the industry. On one hand, we hope that, through the publication of research and tool papers, the workshop will contribute to raising awareness of the methods and tools available among the industrial players. On the other hand, presentation and exchange of realistic case studies should allow academic researchers to better fit their tools to industrial needs, thereby improving the dissemination of results.

This year, we broaden the scope of the MeTRiD workshop to include contributions on the design of systems for increased autonomy in vehicles, the Internet of Things and elsewhere. The key concern in such systems is their ability to handle knowledge and adaptively respond to environment changes, while the ultimate challenge is preserving rigorousness despite the fact that essential properties cannot be guaranteed at design time.

Please check out the MeTRiD series website.

Call for Papers

The workshop will solicit contributions of three types:

• Regular papers, presenting original research

• Case study papers, reporting the evaluation of existing modelling, analysis, transformation and code generation formalisms and tools on realistic examples of significant size

• Tool papers, describing new tool prototypes supporting the RSD flow and enhancements of existing ones

The authors of accepted tool papers will be expected to give a live demonstration at the workshop.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• models and formalisms for specifying user requirements, functional behaviour of application components, coordination and interaction protocols, execution platform architectures, resource utilisation policies etc.
• reference models and architectures for systems of autonomous agents
• model transformation techniques integrating models
• design-time and run-time knowledge generation/transformation for system adaptivity
• analysis techniques for establishing correctness properties at all stages of the design process
• case studies exemplifying potential applications of the RSD approach
• prototype tools supporting various stages of the RSD flow
• tool integration experiences

LIGHTWEIGHT DOUBLE-BLIND POLICY

All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers under a lightweight double-blind policy. The authors would be expected to invest reasonable effort into concealing their identities. However, the main goal is to allow for unbiased review: anonymisation should not affect the quality of submissions, nor in any way hamper their evaluation. In particular, references to technical reports, case study models or tool distributions are acceptable and should be provided where necessary.

PAPER SUBMISSION AND PUBLISHING

Papers of all types will be made available before the workshop on the MeTRiD website and will be published as post-proceedings in the open-access series Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS).
Submitted papers must be in English, presenting original work. They must be unpublished and not submitted for publication elsewhere. All submissions must adhere to the EPTCS formatting style (http://style.eptcs.org/) and are limited to 12 pages (not counting the appendices), but shorter extended abstracts are welcome. Submissions not adhering to the specified format and length may be rejected immediately.

Tool papers should provide the URL of the tool (if available) and illustrate the maturity and robustness of the tool. They must also comprise an appendix of reasonable length (roughly 6 pages, although minor deviations will be tolerated, if necessary) with the description of the demonstration, including screenshots. As usual, appendices will be used for evaluation purposes only and will not be included for publication.

Contributions must be submitted electronically in PDF through EasyChair.

All queries can be sent to metrid2019@easychair.org