The aim of the AVoCS workshop series is to contribute to the
interaction and exchange of ideas among members of the international
research community on tools and techniques for the verification of
critical systems. In particular, AVoCS 2018 aims to bring together
scientists and engineers that are active in the area of formal
methods, develop tools and techniques for the automated verification
of critical systems, and are interested in exchanging their
experiences in the industrial usage of these methods and tools.

The subject is to be interpreted broadly and inclusively. It covers
all aspects of automated verification, including model checking,
theorem proving, SAT/SMT constraint solving, abstract interpretation,
and refinement pertaining to various types of critical systems which
need to meet stringent dependability requirements (safety-critical,
business-critical, performance-critical, etc.). Contributions that
describe different techniques or industrial case studies are
encouraged.

The technical programme will consist of invited and contributed talks
and also allow for short presentations of research ideas. The workshop
will be relatively informal, with an emphasis on discussion where
special discussion sessions will be organised around the research
ideas presentations. 

Submission Guidelines

Submissions of full papers to the workshop must not have been
published or be concurrently considered for publication elsewhere. All
submissions will be peer-reviewed and judged on the basis of
originality, contribution to the field, technical and presentation
quality, and relevance to the workshop. Submissions are handled via
Easychair:

    https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=avocs2018

The papers must be written in English and should not exceed 15 pages,
not counting references and appendices, in Springer LNCS format.

AVoCS also encourages the submissions of research ideas in order to
stimulate discussions at the workshop. Reports on ongoing work or
surveys on work published elsewhere are welcome. The Programme
Committee will select research ideas on the basis of submitted
abstracts according to significance and general interest. Research
ideas must be written in English and not exceed 2 pages using the
Springer LNCS format. The presentation of these ideas will be organised
around discussions, where the presenter should also prepare a set of
questions in which the audience will discuss.
 

List of Topics

• Model Checking
• Automatic and Interactive Theorem Proving
• SAT, SMT or Constraint Solving for Verification
• Abstract Interpretation
• Specification and Refinement
• Requirements Capture and Analysis
• Verification of Software and Hardware
• Specification and Verification of Fault Tolerance and Resilience
• Probabilistic and Real-Time Systems
• Dependable Systems
• Verified System Development
• Industrial Applications

Committees

Program Committee

• Jean-Christophe Filliatre, CNRS, France
• Stefania Gnesi, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Gregor Goessler, INRIA, France
• Marieke Huisman, University of Twente, Netherlands
• Bart Jacobs, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Thierry Lecomte, ClearSy, France
• Michael Leuschel, University of Düsseldorf, Germany
• Stephan Merz, Inria Nancy/LORIA, France
• David Pichardie (co-chair), IRISA/ENS Rennes/Inria, France
• Andrew Reynolds, University of Iowa, USA
• Markus Roggenbach, Swansea University, UK
• Mihaela Sighireanu (co-chair), University Paris Diderot, France
• Bernhard Steffen, University of Dortmund, Germany
• Jun Sun, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
• Maurice Ter Beek, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Caterina Urban, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Laurent Voisin, Systerel, France
• Florian Zuleger, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Steering Committee

• Michael Goldsmith, University of Oxford, UK
• Stephan Merz, INRIA Nancy & LORIA, France
• Markus Roggenbach, Swansea University, UK

Invited Speakers

• Michael Emmi, SRI International, USA
• Antoine Miné, Sorbonne Université, LIP6, France
• Yannick Moy, AdaCore, France
• Michael Tautschnig, Amazon, USA

Publication

At the workshop, pre-proceedings will be available in the form of a
FLoC 2018 pre-proceedings; this report will also
include the research ideas.  After the workshop, the authors of
accepted full papers will have about one month in order to revise
their papers for publication in the workshop post-proceedings
which will appear in the Electronic Communications of the EASST
Open Access Journal. Research ideas will not be part of the
proceedings in the Open Access Journal.

Authors of a selection of the best papers presented at the workshop
will be invited to submit extended versions of their work for
publication in a special issue of Elsevier's journal Science of
Computer Programming.

Venue

The event will at the Department of Computer Science, University of
Oxford. AVoCS is an affiliated event of FM 2018 and it will be hosted
within FLoC 2018 (http://www.floc2018.org). FLoC is a federated
conference of several international conferences related with
mathematical logics and computer science, for example CAV, FSCD,
ICLP, IJCAR, ITP and SAT.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to AVOCS'18 chairs.