Photo by Benh LIEU SONG
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Objectives and Scope

Modern software systems are distributed, concurrent, mobile, and often involve the composition of heterogeneous components and of stand-alone services. Theoretical models, languages and tools for coordinating, composing and adapting services are hence required. They can indeed simplify the development of complex distributed service-based systems, enable functional correctness proofs and improve reusability and maintainability of such systems. In this context, the goal of the FOCLASA workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners of the aforementioned fields, to share their best practices and experiences, to identify common problems, and to devise general solutions in the context of coordination languages, service orchestration, and self-adaptive systems

Topics

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Theoretical models and frameworks for component and service coordination, service composition, service adaptation and concurrent system modelling.

Applications and usability studies for the aforementioned theoretical models, interaction and coordination challenges in various application domains.

Languages and specification protocols for component and service interaction, their semantics, expressiveness, validation and verification, type checking, static and dynamic analysis.

“Software as a service” models (e.g., cloud/edge/fog computing) and dynamic software architectures, such as self-adaptive and self-organizing systems.

Tools and environments for the development of concurrent and customizable self-monitoring, self-adaptive and self-organizing applications.

Algorithms, mathematical models and realization frameworks for quality-of-service observation, storage, history-based analysis in self-adaptive systems.

Practice, experience and solutions from the following areas are solicited as well:

Blockchains and
distributed transactions.

Business process
modelling.

Cloud-based
applications.

Component-based
systems.

Cyber-physical
systems.

Fog/edge computing
systems.

Large-scale
distributed systems.

(Micro)service-based
systems.

Mobile computing
systems.

Multi-agent
systems.

Peer-to-peer
systems.

Self-adaptive
systems.

Call for papers

Contributions must be written in English and report on original, unpublished work not submitted for publication elsewhere. Full papers should be 15 pages long, including figures and references, and prepared by using Springer's LNCS style , Short papers (6 pages long) describing preliminary results or work-in-progress are encouraged as well. The contributions should be submitted as PostScript (PS) or Portable Document Format (PDF) files using the EasyChair submission site:

EasyChair FOCLASA 2018

All submissions will be reviewed by an international program committee who will make a selection among the submissions based on the novelty, soundness and applicability of the presented ideas and results. Concurrent submission to other venues (conferences, workshops or journal) and submission of papers under consideration elsewhere is not allowed.

All accepted papers will be included in the LNCS Workshop Post-proceedings of STAF 2018 , to be published by Springer after the workshop. Additionally, and following the tradition of past editions, the authors of a selected subset of papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers after the workshop, to be reviewed by a new set of reviewers, for publication in a special issue of a journal.

Text version: cfp-foclasa18.txt.

Important dates

Abstract
submission
April 13th, 2018 April 22nd, 2018
Paper
submission
April 20th, 2018 April 30th, 2018
Notification of
acceptance
May 20th, 2018
Final
version
June 10th, 2018

Program committee chairs

Jean-Marie JACQUET

University of Namur, Belgium

Jacopo SOLDANI

University of Pisa, Italy

Steering committee

Farhad ARBAB

CWI, The Netherlands

Antonio BROGI

University of Pisa, Italy

Carlos CANAL

University of Málaga, Spain

Jean-Marie JACQUET

University of Namur, Belgium

Ernesto PIMENTEL

University of Málaga, Spain

Gwen Salaün

University of Grenoble Alpes, France

Program committee

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Pedro Alvarez, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Farhad Arbab, CWI, The Netherlands
Simon Bliudze, INRIA Lille – Nord Europe, France
Radu Calinescu, University of York, UK
Javier Camara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Flavio De Paoli, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
Francisco J. Durán, Universidad de Malaga, Spain
Erik de Vink, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria
Letterio Galletta, IMT Lucca, Italy
Eva Kuhn, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Alberto Lluch Lafuente, Technical University of Denmark
Sun Meng, Peking University, China
Hernan C. Melgratti, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Mohammad Mousavi, Halmstad University, Sweden
Pascal Poizat, Université Paris Ouest, France
Jose Proenca, INESC TEC & Universidade do Minho, Portugal
Gwen Salaün, University of Grenoble, France
Michael Sheng, University of Adelaide, Australia
Marjan Sirjani, Reykjavik University, Iceland
Carolyn Talcott, SRI International, USA
Massimo Tivoli, University of L'Aquila, Italy
Emilio Tuosto, University of Leicester, UK
Lina Ye, CentraleSupélec, France
Gianluigi Zavattaro, University of Bologna, Italy

Program

Opening & invited talk (Chair: Jean-Marie Jacquet)

09.30-09.35: Opening
09.35-10.30: Coordination of Complex Socio-technical Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
Stefano Mariani

Coffee break ☕

Coordination Models (Chair: Jean-Marie Jacquet)

11.00-11.30: Reo Coordination Model for Simulation of Quantum Internet Software
Ebrahim Ardeshir-Larijani and Farhad Arbab
11.30-12.00: Computing the Parallelism Degree of Timed BPMN Processes
Francisco Durán, Camilo Rocha and Gwen Salaün
12.00-12.30: ReoLive: Analysing Connectors in your Browser
Rúben Cruz and Jose Proenca

Lunch 🍔 🍟

Complex software systems (Chair: Jacopo Soldani)

14.00-14.30: Multi-Agent Systems with Virtual Stigmergy
Rocco De Nicola, Luca Di Stefano and Omar Inverso
14.30-15.00: Towards a Hybrid Verification Approach
Nahla El-Araby, Eva Kühn, Anita Messinger and Sophie Therese Radschek
15.00-15.30: Using Reinforcement Learning to Handle the Runtime Uncertainties in Self-Adaptive Software
Tong Wu, Qingshan Li, Lu Wang, Liu He and Yujie Li

Coffee break ☕

Invited talk & closing (Chair: Jacopo Soldani)

16.00-16.55: Microservices, microservices, microservices?
Antonio Brogi
16.55-17.00: Closing

Invited Talks

Coordination of Complex Socio-technical Systems: Challenges and Opportunities by Stefano Mariani.
Abstract. Modern society is a growing interconnection of (sub)systems, such as healthcare, transportation networks, supply chain, etc. Its complexity thus stems from both the inherent complexity of each subsystem, and the added complexity of interactions amongst subsystems. The same can be said for modern IT systems, where managing interactions among components is at least as complex as designing the computational function of each component itself. To make the picture even more complicated, IT systems and the society rarely are isolated systems: rather, the latter relies on the former for many vital services and functionalities, giving birth to the so-called Socio-technical Systems. There, “humans-in-the-loop” are the norm rather than the exception, thus management of interactions further complicates: besides software-software, we now have software-human interactions to account for too. In this talk, we focus on interactions-not computation. Accordingly, we raise issues regarding modelling and designing coordination mechanisms and policies in this sort of systems - i.e. decentralisation, situatedness, accountability, emergence, etc. - and examine some possible solutions originating from the research area in coordination models and languages.

Microservices, microservices, microservices? by Antonio Brogi.
Abstract. In this talk we will critically discuss the main characteristics of microservices and the potentially huge advantages offered by their adoption for managing enterprise applications. We will also show how a simple formalization of the main properties of microservices can be exploited both to automate property checking and to drive the refactoring of existing applications.

Past editions

FOCLASA 2017, a satellite workshop of SEFM 2017, Trento (Italy). Proceedings in LNCS, vol. 10729, 2017. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, Elsevier [under preparation].

FOCLASA 2015, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2015, Madrid (Spain). Proceedings in EPTCS, vol. 201, 2015.

FOCLASA 2014, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2014, Rome (Italy). Proceedings in EPTCS, vol. 175, 2015.

FOCLASA 2013, a satellite workshop of ESOCC 2013, Málaga (Spain). Proceedings in Communications in Computing and Information Science, vol. 393, 2013, Springer. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 115-116, Elsevier, 2016.

FOCLASA 2012, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2012, Newcastle (United Kingdom). Proceedings in EPTCS, vol. 91, 2012. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 115-116, Elsevier, 2016.

FOCLASA 2011, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2011, Aachen (Germany). Proceedings in EPTCS, vol. 58, 2011. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 89 (Part A), Elsevier, 2014.

FOCLASA 2010, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2010, Paris (France). Proceedings in EPTCS, vol. 30, 2010. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 80 (Part A), Elsevier, 2014.

FOCLASA 2009, a satellite workshop of ICALP 2009, Rhodes (Greece). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 255, 2009. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 77(7-8), Elsevier.

FOCLASA 2008, a satellite workshop of ICALP 2008, Reykjavik (Iceland). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 248, 2009. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 76(8), Elsevier.

FOCLASA 2007, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2007, Lisbon (Portugal). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 194(4), 2008. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 76(1), Elsevier.

FOCLASA 2006, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2006, Bonn (Germany). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 175(2), 2007. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 74(9), Elsevier.

FOCLASA 2005, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2005, San Francisco (USA). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 154(1), 2006. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 66(2), Elsevier, 2007.

FOCLASA 2004, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2004, London (United Kingdom). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 180(2), 2007.

FOCLASA 2003, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2003, Marseille (France). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 97, 2004. Special issue in Science of Computer Programming, vol. 61(2), Elsevier, 2006.

FOCLASA 2002, a satellite workshop of CONCUR 2002, Brno (Czech Republic). Proceedings in ENTCS, vol. 68(3), 2003. Special issue in Fundamenta Informaticae, vol 73(4), IOSPress, 2006.

Contacts

For any further information please contact foclasa_at_di.unipi.it.