Theme of the Conference

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and the aerospace industry requires advanced techniques that address their specification, design, verification, validation, and certification requirements. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, academia, and the industry, with the goal of identifying challenges and providing solutions towards achieving assurance for such critical systems.

New developments and emerging applications like autonomous on-board Software for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), UAS Traffic Management (UTM), advanced separation assurance algorithms for aircraft, and the need for system-wide fault detection, diagnosis, and prognostics provide new challenges for system specification, development, and verification approaches. The focus of these symposiums are on formal techniques and other approaches for software assurance, including their theory, current capabilities and limitations, as well as their potential application to aerospace, robotics, and other NASA-relevant safety-critical systems during all stages of the software life-cycle.

The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is an annual event organized by the NASA Formal Methods (NFM) Steering Committee, comprised of researchers spanning several NASA centers. NFM 2020 is being organized by NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.
Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions on cross-cutting approaches that bring together formal methods and techniques from other domains such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, control theory, robotics, and quantum computing among others.

Formal verification, including theorem proving, model checking, and static analysis
Advances in automated theorem proving including SAT and SMT solving
Run-time verification
Techniques and algorithms for scaling formal methods, such as abstraction and symbolic methods, compositional techniques, as well as parallel and/or distributed techniques
Code generation from formally verified models
Safety cases and system safety
Formal approaches to fault tolerance
Design for verification and correct-by-design techniques
Theoretical advances and empirical evaluations of formal methods techniques for safety-critical systems, including hybrid and embedded systems
Formal methods in systems engineering and model-based development
Applications of formal methods in the development of:
autonomous systems
safety-critical artificial intelligence systems
cyber-physical, embedded, and hybrid systems
fault-detection, diagnostics, and prognostics systems
Use of formal methods in:
assurance cases
human-machine interaction analysis
requirements generation, specification, and validation
automated testing and verification

Submission Guidelines

There are two categories of submissions:

Regular papers (15 pages, not counting references and appendices) describing fully developed work and complete results;
Short papers (6 pages, not counting references and appendices) describing tools or experience reports on applications of formal methods to real systems. We strongly encourage papers that are accompanied by publicly-available artifacts.

For regular and short papers, an appendix can provide additional material, e.g., details on proofs or experiments. The appendix is not part of the page count and not guaranteed to be read or taken into account by the reviewers. It should not contain information necessary to the understanding and the evaluation of the presented work.

All papers should be in English and describe original work that has not been published or submitted elsewhere. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee. Papers will appear in a volume of Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS), and must use LNCS style formatting. Author guidelines and templates are available here. LaTeX templates are also available in Overleaf.

Papers should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nfm2020. At least one author of an accepted paper is expected to present the paper at the conference as a registered participant.
Important Dates
Dec 12, 2019 (AoE) Abstract Submission Deadline
Dec 19, 2019 (AoE) Paper Submission Deadline
Feb 20, 2020 Paper Notification
March 27, 2020 Camera-Ready Submission
May 11 - 15, 2020 NFM Symposium
Registration

There will not be a registration fee charged to participants. All interested individuals, including non-US citizens, are welcome to attend, to listen to the talks, and to participate in discussions; however, all attendees must register. Register here!