The International Conference on Systems (ICONS 2008) continues a series of events covering a broad spectrum of topics. The conference covers fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software and hardware systems. Several tracks are proposed to treat the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt.

Ubiquitous systems proliferate with a high velocity due to the latest achievements in the industry of telecommunications, electronics, wireless, and economical globalization. Wireless and mobility allow any user to timely use resources using various access technologies under secured (still to be improved) and guaranteed privacy. The family of the mobile devices expand dramatically, allowing a user to have a portable office everywhere, every time.

Mobile learning became a fact, due to the technical accessibility and Internet communications. Many online classes, learning systems, university curricula, remote education, and virtual training classes are now part of the corporate education and use.

Progress is made in user modeling and adaptive learning models. The generalization of successful practices on mobile learning is favoured by many national and international projects and policy synchronization boards.

In the last years, new system concepts have been promoted and partially embedded in new deployments. Anticipative systems, autonomic and autonomous systems, self-adapting systems, or on-demand systems are systems exposing advanced features. These features demand special requirements specification mechanisms, advanced behavioral design patterns, special interaction protocols, and flexible implementation platforms. Additionally, they require new monitoring and management paradigms, as self-protection, self-diagnosing, self-maintenance become core design features.

The design of application-oriented systems is driven by application-specific requirements that have a very large spectrum. Despite the adoption of uniform frameworks and system design methodologies supported by appropriate models and system specification languages, the deployment of application-oriented systems raises critical problems. Specific requirements in terms of scalability, real-time, security, performance, accuracy, distribution, and user interaction drive the design decisions and implementations.

This leads to the need for gathering application-specific knowledge and develop particular design and implementation skills that can be reused in developing similar systems.

Validation and verification of safety requirements for complex systems containing hardware, software and human subsystems must be considered from early design phases. There is a need for rigorous analysis on the role of people and process causing hazards within safety-related systems; however, these claims are often made without a rigorous analysis of the human factors involved. Accurate identification and implementation of safety requirements for all elements of a system, including people and procedures become crucial in complex and critical systems, especially in safety-related projects from the civil aviation, defense health, and transport sectors.

Fundamentals on safety-related systems concern both positive (desired properties) and negative (undesired properties) aspects. Safety requirements are expressed at the individual equipment level and at the operational-environment level. However, ambiguity in safety requirements may lead to reliable unsafe systems. Additionally, the distribution of safety requirements between people and machines makes difficult automated proofs of system safety. This is somehow obscured by the difficulty of applying formal techniques (usually used for equipment-related safety requirements) to derivation and satisfaction of human-related safety requirements (usually, human factors techniques are used).

The conference has the following tracks:

Systemsâ?? theory and practice

System engineering

Systemsâ?? instrumentation

Embedded systems and systems-on-the-chip

Target-oriented systems

Specialized systems [SPECIAL SYSTEMS]

Validation systems

Security and protection systems

Mobile communications and learning [MCL]

Advanced systems [SPECIAL SYSTEMS]

Application-oriented systems [SPECIAL SYSTEMS]

Safety in industrial systems [SAFESYS]

Micro and nano structures and systems

Embedded systems

Industrial applications

We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, standards, implementations, running experiments and applications. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited topic areas. Industrial presentations are not subject to these constraints. Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.