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## Workshop: Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS)
#### **A satellite workshop of Formal Methods 2019**
This one day workshop will bring together researchers working on a range of techniques for formal verification of autonomous systems, to present recent work in the area, discuss key difficulties, and stimulate collaboration between the robotics and formal methods communities. This workshop will include invited speakers, contributed papers, experience reports, and a discussion panel.
## Scope
Autonomous -- and Robotic -- Systems present unique challenges for formal methods. They are embodied entities that can interact with the real world and make autonomous decisions. Amongst others, they can be viewed as safety-critical, cyber-physical, hybrid, and real-time systems. Key issues for formal methods applied to autonomous systems include capturing how the system will deal with a dynamic external environment and verification of the system's decision making capabilities -- including planning, safety, ethical, and reconfiguration choices. Some autonomous systems require certification before deployment, others require public trust for wide adoption; both of these scenarios are being tackled by formal methods.
The goals of this workshop are to bring together leading researchers in this area to present recent and ongoing work, including experience reports and case studies as well as identify future directions for this emerging application of formal methods. This workshop is concerned with the use of formal methods to specify, model, or verify autonomous or robotic systems, in whole or in part. Submissions may focus on case studies that identify the challenges for formal methods in this area, or experience reports that provide guidelines for tackling these challenges. Work using integrated formal methods, or describing the future directions of this field, are particularly welcome.
## Programme Information
The workshop will feature invited speakers (to be confirmed) and presentations of accepted papers. The workshop will also feature a discussion panel for a structured, whole-group conversation for scoping the future directions of formal methods for autonomous systems.
## Submission Information
There are two categories of submission:
* Short papers -- 6 pages
* Long papers -- 15 pages
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
* Experience reports/case studies on applying formal methods to autonomous and/or robotic systems
* Novel formal methods that can be applied to autonomous and/or robotic systems
* The modification of existing formal methods to suit autonomous and/or robotic systems
* Future directions for formal methods for autonomous and/or robotic systems
Submission will be via easychair, in LNCS format: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fmas2019
Each submission will receive at least three, single-blind reviews. If a paper is accepted, at least one of the authors must attend the workshop to present their work. Revised selected papers will be published in the upcoming FM 2019 Workshops LNCS volume.
## Important Dates
* Submission: 30th June 2019
* Notification: 31st July 2019
* Final Version due: 1st September 2019
* Workshop: at Formal Methods 2019 (7th -- 11th of October 2019)
## Chairs
* Marie Farrell (http://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~marie/), University of Liverpool, UK
* Michael Fisher (https://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~michael/, University of Liverpool, UK
* Matt Luckcuck https://cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mattlck/, University of Liverpool, UK
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