Special issue on formal methods for globally asynchronous and locally synchronous (GALS) systems

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This special issue is based on innovative ideas presented and discussed during the first International Workshop on Formal Methods for Globally Asynchronous and Locally Synchronous Systems (FMGALS) held in conjunction with the Formal Methods in Europe (FME) conference in Pisa, Italy, in the fall of 2003. This one-day workshop was initiated to bring together researchers in the area of formal methods, system design languages, asynchronous hardware design, and GALS design. The event was held in co-operation with ACM SIGDA and ACM SIGARCH. Since this first incarnation, another FMGALS workshop was held in Verona, Italy in 2005. A special issue for that event is already planned. One great outcome of the first workshop is that an FMGALS community has been established through a moderated mailing list. Information and research result exchanges are taking place among the various research communities who are engaged in research aimed at providing theoretical foundations of GALS design, industrial GALS design practices, and de-synchronization theory proposed by the Synchronous Programming community. Selected papers from the 2003 workshop were invited for this special issue together with an open call for papers soliciting novel contributions on the topics of this conference. Rigorous reviews of 12 submissions led to the selection of five papers. In this editorial statement, we outline the premise and the context of this special issue, and briefly introduce the papers selected.