CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: 19th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods (iFM)

19th International Conference on Integrated Formal Methods (iFM) 

13 to 15 November 2024 | University of Manchester, UK | https://ifm2024.cs.manchester.ac.uk/

Reproducibility of experiments is crucial to foster an atmosphere of open, reusable and trustworthy research. To improve and reward reproducibility and to give more visibility and credit to the effort of tool developers in our community, authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit possible artifacts associated with their paper for evaluation, and based on the level of reproducibility they will be awarded one or more badges.

The goals of the artifact evaluation are manifold. We want to encourage authors to provide more substantial evidence to their papers and to reward authors who aim for reproducibility of their results, and therefore create artifacts. Also, we want to give more visibility and credit to the effort of tool developers in our community. Furthermore, we want to simplify the independent replication of results presented in the paper and to ease future comparisons with existing approaches.

Artifact submission is optional. Papers that are successfully evaluated will be awarded one or more artifact badges, but the result of the artifact evaluation will not alter the paper’s acceptance decision. We aim to assess the artifacts themselves and not the quality of the research linked to the artifact, which has been assessed by the iFM 2024 program committee already. The goal of our review process is to be constructive and to improve the submitted artifacts. Only if an artifact cannot be improved to achieve sufficient quality in the given time frame or if it is inconsistent with the paper, it should be rejected.

Important Dates

  • Abstract Submission - 13 June
  • Paper Submission - 17 June
  • Author Notification - 05 August
  • Artifact Registration - 12 August
  • Artifact Submission - 19 August
  • Artifact Notification - 16 September
  • Camera-Ready Papers - 19 September

Objectives and Scope

In the last decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of approaches that integrate several modelling, verification and simulation techniques, facilitating more versatile and efficient analysis of software-intensive systems. These approaches provide powerful support for the analysis of different functional and non-functional properties of the systems, complex interaction of components of different nature as well as validation of diverse aspects of system behaviour.

The iFM conference series is a forum for discussing recent research advances in the development of integrated approaches to formal modelling and analysis. The conference covers all aspects of the design of integrated techniques, including language design, verification and validation, automated tool support and the use of such techniques in software engineering practice.

To credit the effort of tool developers, we use EAPLS artifact badging. See the Call for Artifacts for more details.

Areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Formal and semi-formal modelling notations
  • Combining formal methods with different performance, simulation and system analysis techniques
  • Program verification, model checking, and static analysis
  • Theorem proving, decision procedures and SAT/SMT solving
  • Runtime analysis, monitoring and testing
  • Program synthesis
  • Modelling, analysis and synthesis of cyber-physical, hybrid, embedded, probabilistic, distributed or concurrent systems
  • Abstraction and refinement
  • Model learning and inference
  • Approaches to integrating formal methods into software engineering practice or industry
  • Approaches to integrating formal methods into standardisation or certification processes
  • Formal methods for artificial intelligence, including machine learning and data-based techniques
  • Tools and case studies supporting the integration of formal methods

Paper Categories

We solicit papers in the following categories.

  1. Regular papers (limit 16 pages) presenting:
    • original scientific research results;
    • tools, their foundation and evaluations;
    • applications of formal methods, including rigorous evaluations and case studies.
  2. Short papers (limit 6 pages) describing any work in the area of formal methods, including work-in-progress and preliminary results that are sufficiently interesting for the iFM community.

All page limits exclude the references. Appendices may be included, but they will only be read by a reviewer at their discretion.

Regular and short papers must be original, unpublished, and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers will undergo a thorough review process. Submissions will be judged on the basis of significance, relevance, correctness, originality, and clarity.

The submissions will be reviewed and selected for publication based on the above-mentioned criteria as well as suitability to the conference’s technical program. The review process is single blind.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions for all categories should be made using the iFM 2024 EasyChair site:

easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ifm24

Submissions must be in PDF format, using the Springer LNCS style files.

Springer requires that authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. After a paper is accepted, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.

The conference proceedings will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. A special issue of the Formal Aspects of Computing journal is planned for extended versions of selected papers from iFM 2024.

All accepted papers must be presented at the conference. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the conference by the early registration date.

EAPLS Artifact Badging

Reproducibility of experiments is crucial to foster an atmosphere of open, reusable and trustworthy research. To improve and reward reproducibility and to give more visibility and credit to the effort of tool developers in our community, authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit possible artifacts associated with their paper for evaluation, and based on the level of reproducibility they will be awarded one or more badges. See eapls.org/pages/artifact_badges. Artifact submission is optional and the result of the artifact evaluation will not alter the paper’s acceptance decision.

For more information, see the Call for Artifacts page.

Best Paper

iFM 2024 will honor the best paper selected with respect to reviews, program committee discussions and conference presentations with an award.

Submitted by Amy Karns on