Preface: Volume 43

Abstract

Formal Methods ElsewhereA Satellite Workshop of FORTE-PSTV-2000 devoted to applications of formal methods to areas other than communication protocols and software engineeringA wide variety of formal models, languages and methods have been developed in the last two decades for supporting the specification, design, verification, implementation and testing of computer networks and distributed software systems. These include CCS, pi-calculus, timed and stochastic process algebra, VDM, Z, B, Automata and Timed Automata, Petri Nets, Statecharts, Logics, TLA, Message Sequence Charts, ADT's, OBJ, Larch, formal Object-Oriented approaches, the international standards Estelle, LOTOS, SDL, ASN.1 and TTCN, and others.Formal specification languages have been designed to support the description of system structure and behaviour in terms of concepts such as event occurrence, observation and experiment, temporal ordering, causality, cooperation and synchronisation among entities, non determinism, concurrency and parallelism, state changes and invariants, and others. While considerable experience has been gained in the application of formal methods to the areas for which they were initially conceived, the high abstraction level of these concepts suggests that they could play an important role in several other disciplines such as chemistry, biology, physics and even arts, humanites and social sciences.After two decades of ‘traditional’ applications, during which the initial gap between the excessive optimism of academic supporters and the skepticism of industrial detractors have been substantially reduced, often leading to a positive and constructive attitude towards their adoption, formal methods are perhaps ready to spread out of their native territory and, at the turn of the decade and millenium, invade new exciting areas of research, thus providing a much wider exploitation of the huge intellectual investment behind their definition. In fact, it is often the case that a technique designed with a particular application in mind, turns out to perform better and to be more useful in a context other than the originally intended one.For more information on the spectrum of topics within the remit of the FM-Elsewhere initiative, see this web page. A list of existing “Elsewhere” applications of formal methods can also be accessed at this web page.The FM-Elsewhere workshop, co-located with FORTE-PSTV-2000 in Pisa, was a forum for researchers interested in the application of formal methods, as identified above, to virtually any area of research, except communication protocols and software engineering. The talks included in the workshop covered the spectrum of FM-Elsewhere areas. In particular, applications of formal methods to all the following areas were considered, safety analysis of cockpit interfaces;solving games and puzzles using state space exploration techniques;modelling theories of the mind;usability anaylsis of human computer interfaces;formal definition of linguistic systems; andmodelling in mechanics and physics.Thanks should be made to a number of people. Firstly, FM-Elsewhere 2000 was fortunate to have two celebrated invited speakers, John Rushby who spoke on how model checking techniques can be used in analysing cockpit interfaces; andProfessor David Duce who spoke on using state based specification techniques to model cognitive systems.Secondly, we would like to thank the workshop sponsors - The Computing Laboratory at the University of Kent at Canterbury and CNR-Istituto CNUCE, in Pisa.Thirdly, the workshop benefited from the reviewing efforts of the workshop committee. Tommaso Bolognesi (CNR/I.E.I. at Pisa, Italy)Howard Bowman (Univ. of Kent at Canterbury, UK)Alan Dix (aQtive Limited, UK)David Duce (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK)David Duke (University of York, UK)Giorgio Faconti (CNR/CNUCE at Pisa, Italy)Chris Johnson (University of Glasgow, UK)Peter Johnson (University of Bath, UK)Peter B. Ladkin (University of Bielefeld, Germany)Scott Smolka (State University of New York at Stony Brook, US)Graziella Tonfoni (University of Bologna, Italy and The George Washington Unversity, US)Ken Turner (University of Stirling, UK)Finally, thanks should go to Professor Mike Mislove for his help during the proceedings editorial process and to Kerry Riches for her help in preparing the participants proceedings.