The ABZ conference is dedicated to the cross-fertilization of six related state-based and machine-based formal methods, Abstract State Machines (ASM), Alloy, B, TLA, VDM and Z, that share a common conceptual foundation and are widely used in both academia and industry for the design and analysis of hardware and software systems. It builds on the success of the first ABZ conference held in London in 2008, where the ASM, B and Z conference series merged into a single event, the second ABZ 2010 conference held in Orford (Canada), where the Alloy community joined the event, the ABZ 2012 held in Pisa (Italy), which saw the inclusion of the VDM community, the ABZ 2014 held in Toulouse (France), which brought the inclusion of the TLA community into the ABZ conference series, and the ABZ 2016 held in Linz, Austria. The ABZ 2018 conference will be held in Southampton, UK.

Contributions are solicited on all aspects of the theory and applications of ASMs, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM, Z approaches in software/hardware engineering, including the development of tools and industrial applications. The program spans from theoretical and methodological foundations to practical applications, emphasizing system engineering methods and tools that are distinguished by mathematical rigor and have proved to be industrially viable. The main goal of the conference is to contribute to the integration of accurate state- and machine-based system development methods, clarifying their commonalities and differences to better understand how to combine different approaches for accomplishing the various tasks in modelling, experimental validation, mathematical verification of reliable high-quality hardware/software systems.

Although organized to host several formal methods with ASM, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM and Z, in a single event, editorial control of the joint conference is vested in one integrated program committee, which will respectively determine its ASM, Alloy, B, TLA, VDM and Z content, to be presented in parallel conference tracks with a schedule to allow the participants to switch between the sessions.

As successfully practiced at ABZ 2014 and ABZ 2016, the 6th edition of ABZ will include again special sessions dedicated to a shared real-life case study among all the methods addressed in ABZ 2018. The objective of this session is to enrich the set of case studies developed with ABZ methods with a practical and real-life case study. After the success of the “Landing Gear” case study at ABZ 2014 in the aeronautical context and the "Hemodialysis Machine" case study at ABZ 2016 in the medical domain, this time the organisers defined a real-life case study issued from the railway domain with challenging safety requirements. The ABZ 2018 case study is in related to the Hybrid ERTMS/ETCS Level 3 standard. See here for a detailed description of this case study.




Call for Papers

Four kinds of contributions are invited:

Full research papers: full papers of not more than 14 pages in LNCS format, which have to be original, unpublished and not submitted elsewhere.
Short presentations of work in progress, and tool demonstrations: this is an excellent opportunity for Ph.D. students to present and validate their work in progress. An extended abstract of not more than 4 pages is expected and will be reviewed.
Answers to case study papers: full papers of not more than 14 pages in LNCS format reporting on the experiments conducted with any of the state based techniques in the scope of ABZ 2018.
Application in industry papers: reporting on work or experiences on the application of state based formal methods in industry. An extended abstract of not more than 4 pages is expected and will be reviewed. It is also an interesting option for industrial practitioners who sometimes face too many constraints to prepare a full paper.