NFM 2020

12th NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2020)

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and the aerospace industry requires advanced techniques that address their specification, design, verification, validation, and certification requirements. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, academia, and the industry, with the goal of identifying challenges and providing solutions towards achieving assurance for such critical systems.

New developments and emerging applications like autonomous on-board Software for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), UAS Traffic Management (UTM), advanced separation assurance algorithms for aircraft, 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 2020 is being organized by NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.

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

• Run-time verification
• Specification synthesis
• 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
• Design for verification and correct-by-design techniques
• 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
• Applications of formal methods in the development of:
• autonomous systems
• safety-critical artificial intelligence systems
• cyber-physical, embedded, and hybrid systems
• fault-detection, diagnostics, and prognostics systems
• Use of formal methods in:
• assurance cases
• human-machine interaction analysis
• requirements generation, specification, and validation
• automated testing and verification

Keynote Speakers

• Leonard Bouygues - Google Loon
• Byron Cook - Amazon Web Services (AWS) - University College London (UCL)
• David Dill - Facebook - Stanford University
• Dana Schulze - National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)
• Sanjit Seshia - University of California Berkeley
• Vandi Verma - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)