ACM TECS Special Issue on the Verification of Cyber-Physical Software Systems

Call for Papers

ACM TECS Special Issue on the Verification of Cyber-Physical Software Systems (VCPSS) 

http://acmtecs.acm.org/vcpss.htm 

Background

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a broad class of systems that integrate (engineered) physical systems with computational and communication systems. Examples of CPS range from small scale systems, such as implanted medical devices or autonomous robots, to medium scale, such as automobiles and aircrafts, to large scale systems, for example, a power grid. A key component of every CPS is the underlying (possibly distributed and heterogeneous) software that controls a system or a system of systems. 

Numerical and logical errors in the software can have catastrophic results on the physical system. For over a decade, the hybrid systems community has been actively looking for solutions to the verification problem of CPSs by targeting mainly the interaction between the physical system and the software at the abstract logical level. However, more is required. Many well-known CPSs failures have been attributed to the existence of numerical errors and bugs in the software. Well known examples are the failures of the space missile Ariane V and the radiation therapy system THERAC. 

This special issue aims to initiate and publicize high quality original work along such research directions. Namely, the theme of this issue is the formal verification and testing of CPSs. 

Topics

Areas of interest include but are not limited to: 

• Numerical properties of control software
• New models and abstraction techniques
• Relationship between numerical and real computation
• Real-time software
• Compositionality and modularity
• Automatically generated software
• Software-hardware interactions
• Applications to CPSs and, especially, to automotive and aerospace systems
• Benchmark problems of control systems software 

Particular attention will be given to submissions that target different aspects of formal verification and testing in the context of the above topics related to CPS software. 

Timetable

• Submission deadline: June 30th, 2009
• Review results: October 1st, 2009
• Final copy deadline: December 1st, 2009 

Guest Editors

• Georgios Fainekos (NEC Labs)
• Eric Goubault (CEA LIST)
• Franjo Ivančić (NEC Labs)
• Sriram Sankaranarayanan (NEC Labs) 

Submission details

A selected number of top papers from the second workshop on Numerical Software Verification (NSV-II) [http://theory.stanford.edu/~srirams/nsv/index.html] will be invited by the guest editors for review. Besides submissions from NSV-II, any other high quality submission that fits the topics of this special issue is welcome. The invited papers will be subjected to the same rigorous review process as the regular submissions to this special issue. 

Authors should submit their journal version at Manuscript Central [http://acm.manuscriptcentral.com/] adhering to the formatting instructions [http://acmtecs.acm.org/gtsi.htm] on the TECS Web page [http://www.acm.org/tecs]. Note that the page limit is not fixed for ACM TECS. 

Important: On the first page and in the field "cover letter" state "Submitted to the Special issue on the Verification of Cyber-Physical Software Systems".