This workshop, affiliated with OOPSLA 2001 was held in Tampa Bay, Florida on October 14, 2001. Information is available on the following topics.
The goal of this workshop is to explore how formal (i.e., mathematical) techniques can be or should be used to establish a suitable foundation for specification and verification of component-based systems. Component-based systems are a growing concern for the object-oriented community. Specification and reasoning techniques are urgently needed to permit composition of systems from components, for which source code is unavailable. The workshop will consider formalization of both functional and performance behavior.
We would like to bring together researchers and practitioners in the areas of component-based software and formal methods, to address the specification and verification problems. We are also interested in bridging the gap between principles and practice. The idea would be to focus more of the effort in formal methods on component-based systems. For example, researchers in formal methods have only recently begun to study principles of object-oriented software specification and verification, but do not yet have a good handle on how inheritance can be exploited in specification and verification. Other issues are also important in the practice of component-based systems, such as concurrency, mechanization and scalability, performance (time and space), reusability, and understandability. The participants will brainstorm about these and related topics to understand both the problems involved and how formal techniques may be useful in solving them. The main expected result of the meeting would be an outline of collaborative research topics and a list of areas for further exploration. Details may vary with the background and interest of the participants.