*** With apologies for multiple copies ***

                           Call For Papers
                           ===============

            Formal Aspects of Virtual Organisations (FAVO 2008)
           May 26, 2008, Aabo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
                     (in conjunction with FM'08)

              http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/FAVO2008/

Advances in network technology, software and services are making it ever easier for organisations and individuals to form loosely-coupled Virtual Organisations (VOs) around a common goal, often in order to take advantage of a business opportunity or respond to an acute crisis. VOs arise in commercial, governmental, political and military environments and may have been carefully designed or may simply be ad hoc assemblies integrating diverse systems that only rarely have been designed for collaboration. VO members may have differing trust and security policies. They may evolve dynamically as the environment, membership and resource availability change.  

Although VOs are a common business model, a mature formal understanding of them has yet to develop.  Integration of diverse members and policies, management of evolution and an understanding of emergent behaviour all contribute to a substantial challenge for designers of VOs and their members. The FAVO workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share challenges and potential solutions in this new application area for formal methods. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Modelling and analysis of VO infrastructure and topologies 
* Modelling and analysis of VO goals and policies 
* Modelling and analysis of VO workflow 
* Modelling and analysis of information flow within VOs	
* Modelling and analysis of trust and security in VOs
* Calculi for reasoning about behaviour in dynamic VOs
* Methods and tools for VO design and VO component design
* Applications of formal methods in VO development 
* Semantic technologies for VOs 
* Formal methods for domain-specific VOs 
* Formalizing languages that enable VOs

In addition to papers addressing the above topics, we seek papers presenting  VO challenge problems  to the formal methods research community.  These would provide benchmarking examples with which to assess and evaluate formal VO research.  

Chairs

Jeremy Bryans & John Fitzgerald, Newcastle University, UK

Programme Committee

Alvaro Arenas, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK
Luis Camarinha-Matos, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Wojciech Cellary, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
Theo Dimitrakos, British Telecom, UK
Simon Foley, University College, Cork, Ireland
Tomasz Janowski, UNU-IIST Center for Electronic Governance, Macau SAR, China
Fabio Martinelli, IIT-CNR, Italy
Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo, Birkbeck College, London, UK
Philippe Massonet, CETIC, Belgium
Tom McCutcheon, Dstl, UK

Submission Instructions

Authors are invited to submit papers on original research, papers offering challenge problems on VOs and VO design, position papers that discuss hot topics or future research directions, and work in progress papers. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages, LNCS format. 

Proceedings 

Papers will be subject to peer review. Proceedings will be available at the workshop and on the web as a Newcastle University Technical Report. Following the workshop we plan to solicit contributions to a special issue of an international journal. 

Important Dates

Submission 14th March 2008
Notification of acceptance 11th April 2008
Camera Ready Copy due 2nd May 2008
Date of workshop 26th May 2008

http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/events/FAVO2008/