Preface to the special issue on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS'2014)

Abstract

The aim of the FMICS workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers who are interested in the development and application of formal methods in industry. In particular, FMICS brings together scientists and engineers that are active in the area of formal methods and interested in exchanging their experiences in the industrial usage of these methods. The FMICS workshop series also strives to promote research and development for the improvement of formal methods and tools for industrial applications. The papers presented in this special issue are the result of several evaluation steps. FMICS 2014 received 26 papers among which 13 were accepted. After the workshop, selected papers were published in Lecture Notes of Computer Science volume 8718. The authors of 6 papers were invited to submit extended versions for publication in this special issue. Those papers passed two to three rounds of review and finally 5 were accepted to be included in the journal. The contents of this issue illustrate the variety of problems, techniques, and application domains in the scope of formal methods for industrial critical systems. Four out of the five papers are about the application of formal methods to a particular problem, in a particular application domain, whereas the last one addresses the development of a formal verification technique, independently of any particular application domain.