18th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems (FORMATS 2020)

September 1-3, 2020, Vienna, Austria

Co-Located with CONCUR, FMICS, and QEST as part of QONFEST 2020.

For questions please contact Nathalie Bertrand or Nils Jansen.

The program is online!

FORMATS, together with all conferences joint within QONFEST, will be held as a virtual meeting in light of the current Covid-19 pandemic. More information will follow soon. We have decided to already postpone the abstract and paper submission deadlines by two weeks to give everybody planning certainty and the opportunity to submit their best research papers to FORMATS 2020.

Flyer Download

The online proceedings by Springer will soon be available here.

Important Dates

(April 4, 2020) (April 28, 2020) April 28, 2020Abstract submission
(April 13, 2020) (April 27, 2020) May 07, 2020Paper submission
June 29, 2020Author notification
July 08, 2020Camera-ready version
September 1-3, 2020Conference

Venue and Registration

For details about the conference venue and the registration, please refer to the QONFEST 2020 webpage.

Accepted Papers

Program

Check also the full QONFEST progam.

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

11:00 - 12:00

Keynote

Annabelle McIver. On Privacy and Accuracy in Data Releases
12:00 - 13:00

Social Lunch

Best Paper Awards (FORMATS, CONCUR, QEST)
13:00 - 14:15

Session FOS2
Reachability
Chair: Arnd Hartmanns
Web Chair: Lilly Treml

  • FORMATS 2020 Opening
  • Dongxu Li, Stanley Bak and Sergiy Bogomolov. Reachability Analysis of Nonlinear Systems Using Hybridization and Dynamics Scaling.
  • Martin Kölbl, Stefan Leue and Robert Schmid. Dynamic Causes for the Violation of Timed Reachability Properties.
14:15 - 14:45 Break
14:45 - 16:00

Session FOS4
Timed Automata
Chair: Frédéric Herbreteau
Web Chair: Dennis Gross

  • Thierry Jéron, Nicolas Markey, David Mentré, Reiya Noguchi and Ocan Sankur. Incremental methods for checking real-time consistency.
  • Susanna Donatelli and Serge Haddad. Guarded Autonomous Transitions Increase Conciseness and Expressiveness of Timed Automata.
  • Rémi Parrot and Didier Lime. Backward Symbolic Optimal Reachability in Weighted Timed Automata.
16:00 - 16:30 Break
16:30 - 17:30

Keynote
Chair:
Nils Jansen

Alessandro Abate. Certified learning, or learning for verification?

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

13:00 - 14:15

Session FOS6
Learning
Chair: Guillermo Alberto Perez
Web Chair: Marnix Suilen

  • Léo Henry, Thierry Jéron and Nicolas Markey. Active learning of timed automata with unknown resets.
  • Nicolas Basset, Thao Dang, Akshay Mambakam and José Ignacio Requeno Jarabo. Learning specifications for labelled patterns.
  • Edoardo Bacci and David Parker. Probabilistic Guarantees for Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning.
14:15 - 14:45 Break
14:45 - 16:00

Session FOS8
Monitoring
Chair: Ocan Sankur
Web Chair: Dennis Gross

  • Wolfgang Granig, Stefan Jaksic, Lewitschnig Horst, Cristinel Mateis and Dejan Nickovic. Weakness Monitors for Fail-Aware Systems.
  • Xin Qin and Jyotirmoy Deshmukh. Clairvoyant Monitoring for Signal Temporal Logic Patterns.
  • Brian Kempa, Pei Zhang, Phillip Jones, Joseph Zambreno and Kristin Yvonne Rozier. Embedding online RV for fault disambiguation on Robonaut2.
16:00 - 16:30 Break
16:30 - 17:30

Keynote

Tom Henzinger. A Survey of Bidding Games on Graphs

Thursday, September 3, 2020

13:00 - 14:15

Session FOS11
Solver, Proof Systems
Chair: Nathalie Bertrand
Web Chair: Lilly Treml

14:15 - 14:45 Break
14:45 - 16:00

Session FOS13
Timed Games
Chair: Patrick Totzke
Web Chair: Marnix Suilen

16:00 - 16:30 Break
16:30 - 17:30

Keynote

Roderick Bloem. Safe Reinforcement Learning using Probabilistic Shields

Sponsors

Interchain Foundation

Platinum Sponsor

Invited Speakers

Alessandro Abate

FORMATS invited speaker

Alessandro Abate is Professor of Verification and Control in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Earlier, he has done research at SRI International and at Stanford University, and has been an Assistant Professor at the Delft Center for Systems and Control, TU Delft. He has received a Laurea degree from the University of Padova and a MS/PhD from UC Berkeley. For more details, please see his departmental page or his research group page.


Roderick Bloem

FORMATS + CONCUR + FMICS invited speaker

Roderick Bloem received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 1996, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, in 2001. From 2002 until 2008, he was an Assistant at Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria. From 2008, he has been a full professor of Computer Science at the same university. He has published over 80 peer reviewed papers in formal verification, reactive synthesis and security. He leads the Austrian National Research Network on Rigorous Systems Engineering and has organized events including the Computer Aided Verification conference and Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design.


Annabelle McIver

FORMATS + CONCUR + QEST invited speaker

Annabelle McIver is a professor of Computer Science at Macquarie University in Sydney. Annabelle trained as a mathematician at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Her research uses mathematics to prove quantitative properties of programs, and more recently to provide foundations for quantitative information flow for analysing security properties. She is co-author of the book "Abstraction, Refinement and Proof for Probabilisic Systems", and of the forthcoming title "The Science of Quantitative Information Flow”.

Committees

Program Chairs

Steering Committee

Program Committee

Call for Papers

Objective

Timing aspects of systems from a variety of computer science domains have been treated independently by different communities. Researchers interested in semantics, verification, and performance analysis study models such as timed automata and timed Petri nets, the digital design community focuses on propagation and switching delays, while designers of embedded controllers have to take account of the time taken by controllers to compute their responses after sampling the environment. Timing-related questions in these separate disciplines do have their particularities. However, there is a growing awareness that there are basic problems that are common to all of them. In particular, all these sub-disciplines treat systems whose behaviour depends upon combinations of logical and temporal constraints; namely, constraints on the temporal distances between occurrences of events.

Topics

The aim of FORMATS is to promote the study of fundamental and practical aspects of timed systems, and to bring together researchers from different disciplines that share interests in modelling and analysis of timed systems. This year again, FORMATS aims at being more inclusive with respect to applications, notably real-time systems and emerging directions such as data science. Typical topics include (but are not limited to):
  • Foundations and Semantics: Theoretical foundations of timed systems and languages; comparison between different models (timed automata, timed Petri nets, hybrid automata, timed process algebra, max-plus algebra, probabilistic models).
  • Methods and Tools: Techniques, algorithms, data structures, and software tools for analyzing timed systems and resolving temporal constraints (scheduling, worst-case execution time analysis,optimization, model checking, testing, constraint solving, etc.).
  • Applications: Adaptation and specialization of timing technology in application domains in which timing plays an important role (real-time software, hardware circuits, and problems of scheduling in manufacturing and telecommunication).

Special Sessions

This year, FORMATS additionally encourages submissions in two particular topics.
  • Data-driven methods for timed systems: (chaired by Guillermo Alberto Perez) We are interested in all kind of data-driven methods such as machine learning or automata learning that consider timing aspects. Examples are automata learning for timed automata or reinforcement learning with timing constraints.
  • Probabilistic and timed systems: (chaired by Arnd Hartmanns) Real-time systems often encompass probabilistic or random behavior. We are interested in all approaches to model or analyze such systems, for instance through probabilistic timed automata, or stochastic timed Petri nets.

Paper Submission

FORMATS 2020 solicits high-quality papers reporting research results and/or experience reports related to the topics mentioned above. Submitted papers must contain original, unpublished contributions, not submitted for publication elsewhere. The papers should be submitted electronically in PDF, following the Springer LNCS style guidelines. Regular papers should not exceed 15 pages in length (excluding references, that are therefore not limited), and short papers (for instance describing case studies, or implementations) are limited to 5 pages (again excluding references). Each paper will undergo a thorough review process. If necessary, the paper may be supplemented with a clearly marked appendix, which will be reviewed at the discretion of the program committee. Papers will be submitted electronically via the EasyChair online submission system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=formats2020

Publication and best paper award

The proceedings of FORMATS 2020 will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. The best paper of the conference will be awarded the Oded Maler Award in Timed Systems.