NFM 2023

NASA Formal Methods Symposium 2023

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 an annual 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.

Topics of Interest

• 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