CTSE

Self-adaptive software systems are establishing themselves as a mean for continuously assuring the software requirements in spite of dynamic, unpredictable, and uncertain execution environments. Nonetheless, most of the current approaches lack the formal grounding needed to guarantee the effectiveness, robustness, and dependability of the adaptation mechanisms. Control Theory developed a broad set of mathematical techniques for adapting physical plants. Despite the parallel within the two adaptation problems is self-evident, a Control Theory for Software Engineering places unprecedented challenges for both disciplines. Software engineers are required to abstract system behaviors into mathematical models suitable for control and to devise broadly applicable development processes taking “controllability” as a first class concern. Control Theory, used to deal mostly with unchangeable physical laws and limited measurable quantities, has to readjust to a new playground where the “physics” of virtual environments is often a design choice, calling for a paradigm shift from classic control. This workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers active in the two disciplines, fostering the definition of software adaptation methodologies with control theoretical formal guarantees.

Call for Papers

We invite high–quality submissions describing original and unpublished results on the use of control theoretical concepts for the design of software systems. We welcome theoretical, experimental, industrial, empirical, case study, position, and challenge papers, as well as multi-disciplinary work bringing results from other disciplines for the solution of problems related to software control and uncertainty management. We encourage the authors to facilitate reproducibility of the proposed results making available or describing relevant data sets and tools.

The submitted papers should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere before a decision has been notified. The accepted paper will be included in the proceedings of ESEC-FSE 2015 edited by ACM SIGSOFT.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Challenges in applying Control Theory for Software Engineering
• Experience on the application of control for software systems
• Event-based control for software systems
• Equation-based control for software systems
• Control methodologies and techniques for software
• Design patterns and architectures for control
• Verification and Validation of controlled systems
• Mathematical modeling of software for control
• Modeling of time and uncertainty for software
• Model identification and continuous learning
• Controller synthesis for stochastic behavioral models
• Control strategies for dependable approximate computing
• Distributed and collaborative software control
• Control theoretical solutions for resource provisioning and energy awareness
• Development processes for controllable software
• Control theoretical solutions for software intensive cyber-physical systems

We envision two kinds of submissions: full research papers (up to 8 pages) describing novel ongoing work to solve relevant problems and short position statements (up to 4 pages) focusing on open challenges and opportunities. All the submissions must be prepared in ACM conference format and comply with the format requirements of ESEC-FSE 15 and be submitted via EasyChair, using this link.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: May 29, 2015
• Papers submission: June 5, 2015
• Authors notification: June 29, 2015
• Camera-ready submission: July 15, 2015