NFM 2019

11th Annual NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2019)

Challenges for Future Exploration

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and in the aerospace industry require advanced techniques that address these systems' specification, design, verification, validation, and certification requirements. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM) is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, academia, and industry. NFM's goals are to identify challenges and to provide solutions for achieving assurance for such critical systems.

New developments and emerging applications like autonomous software for uncrewed deep space human habitats, caretaker robotics, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), UAS Traffic Management (UTM), and the need for system-wide fault detection, diagnosis, and prognostics provide new challenges for system specification, development, and verification approaches. The focus of these symposiums are on formal techniques and other approaches for software assurance, including their theory, current capabilities and limitations, as well as their potential application to aerospace, robotics, and other NASA-relevant safety-critical systems during all stages of the software life-cycle.

The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is an annual event organized by the NASA Formal Methods (NFM) Steering Committee, comprised of researchers spanning several NASA centers. NFM 2019 is being co-organized by Rice University and NASA- Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

The meeting will be comprised of invited talks by leading researchers and practitioners, a panel discussion on the challenges of future exploration that formal methods could address , and more specialized talks based on contributed papers.

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions on cross-cutting approaches that bring together formal methods and techniques from other domains such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, control theory, robotics, and quantum computing among others.

Formal verification, including theorem proving, model checking, and static analysis
Advances in automated theorem proving including SAT and SMT solving
Use of formal methods in software and system testing
Run-time verification
Techniques and algorithms for scaling formal methods, such as abstraction and symbolic methods, compositional techniques, as well as parallel and/or distributed techniques
Code generation from formally verified models
Safety cases and system safety
Formal approaches to fault tolerance
Theoretical advances and empirical evaluations of formal methods techniques for safety-critical systems, including hybrid and embedded systems
Formal methods in systems engineering and model-based development
Correct-by-design controller synthesis
Formal assurance methods to handle adaptive systems

Program Committee

Erika Abraham, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Armin Biere, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Nikolaj Bjorner, Microsoft, USA
Sylvie Boldo, INRIA, France
Jonathan Bowen, London South Bank University, UK
Gianfranco Ciardo, Iowa State University, US
Darren Cofer, Rockwell Collins, US
Frederic Dadeau, FEMTO-ST, France
Ewen Denney, NASA, US
Gilles Dowek, INRIA and ENS Paris-Saclay, France
Steven Drager, AFRL, US
Catherine Dubois, ENSIIE-Samovar, France
Alexandre Duret-Lutz, LRDE/EPITA, France
Aaron Dutle, NASA, US
Marco Gario, Siemens Corporate Technology, US
Alwyn Goodloe, NASA, US
Arie Gurfinkel, University of Waterloo, Canada
John Harrison, Amazon Web Services, USA
Klaus Havelund, JPL/NASA, USA
Constance Heitmeyer, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
Marieke Huisman, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Shafagh Jafer, Embry-Riddle University, USA
Xiaoqing Jin, Toyota Technical Center, USA
Rajeev Joshi, JPL/NASA, USA
Laura Kovacs, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Joe Leslie-Hurd, Intel, US
Panagiotis Manolios, Northeastern University, US
Cristian Mattarei, Stanford University, US
Stefan Mitsch, Carnegie Mellon University, US
Cesar Munoz, NASA, US
Anthony Narkawicz, NASA, US
Necmiye Ozay, University of Michigan, US
Corina Pasareanu, CMU/NASA, USA
Lee Pike, USA
Johann Schumann, SGT, USA
Cristina Seceleanu, Malardalen University, Sweden
Bernhard Steffen, University of Dortmund, Germany
Stefano Tonetta, FBK-IRST, Italy
Ufuk Topcu, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Christoph Torens, German Aerospace Center, Germany
Michael Watson, NASA, USA
Huan Xu, University of Maryland, US

Organizers

Conference Chair: Moshe Vardi (Rice University)
Program Committee Chairs: Julia Badger (NASA) and Kristin Yvonne Rozier (Iowa State University)

Contact

Email: nfm2019 [at] easychair [dot] org
Web: https://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/R2/pages/nfm2019.html