Call for Participation:
2nd International Workshop on Living With Inconsistency
May 13, 2001
Toronto, Canada
(Part of ICSE'01)
Workshop webpage: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/IWLWI-01/
Main ICSE website: http://www.csr.uvic.ca/icse2001/
Program
The workshop program is now available.
A list of participants is also available
Overview
In software engineering, there has long been a recognition that inconsistency
is a fact of life. Evolving descriptions of software artefacts are frequently
inconsistent, and tolerating this inconsistency is important if flexible
collaborative working is to be supported. The first international workshop
on Living with Inconsistency, held at ICSE-97, examined a wide range of
sources of inconsistency, including multiple conflicting viewpoints, process
deviations, and runtime inconsistency arising from mismatches between software
and its environment. The papers presented at the workshop discussed methods
for detecting and handling these different types of inconsistency, with
a view to mitigating their effects. Many of the ideas presented at this
workshop were subsequently published in two special issues of IEEE TSE,
on Managing Inconsistency in Software Development.
This second workshop will focus on reasoning in the presence of inconsistency.
Automated reasoning plays an important role throughout software development,
for building and exploring requirements models, validating specifications,
verifying correctness of implementations, monitoring runtime behavior,
and analyzing development processes. Automated reasoning has a role in
detecting and analyzing both horizontal inconsistency (between artifacts
at the same level of abstraction, i.e. at the same step of the software
lifecycle) and vertical inconsistency (between artefacts at different levels
of abstraction or stages of development)
However, formal reasoning based on classical logic is limited in the
face of inconsistency: a single contradiction results in trivialization
- everything is true! This problem often limits the utility of existing
tools for formal reasoning including model checking, theorem proving, logic
programming, and model-based reasoning.
There are a number of general approaches to overcoming this problem:
-
discard information until the inconsistency disappears. This leads to approaches
that reason about partial models, for example by reasoning about abstractions
or projections of a model, or by generating and reasoning about multiple
worlds.
-
circumscribe the inconsistent information, to allow some (incomplete) reasoning
to continue. This leads to approaches where inconsistency detected at one
stage of development is tolerated until some later stage, for example by
developing monitors that detect whether the inconsistency affects run-time
behavior.
-
adopt a non-classical logic, that avoids trivialization in the face of
inconsistency. For example, paraconsistent logics allow true contradictions
without a resulting trivialization. However, many challenges remain in
learning how to apply these for automated reasoning in software engineering.
The aim of this workshop is to discuss these and other approaches to supporting
automated reasoning in the presence of inconsistency. The workshop will
bring together researchers tackling various aspects of this problem, and
will compare approaches and examine the challenges of applying them in
practice.
Workshop Format and Submissions
The workshop is a one-day workshop, with a mixture of presentations and
discussions. To keep the workshop focused, participation will be limited
to 30 attendees.
If you wish to attend, please submit a 2-page position paper to the
workshop chairs by March 15, 2001. Submissions should be submitted electronically,
in postscript or PDF format. Position papers will be reviewed by the organizing
committee, and used to select participants and speakers.
Organizing Committee
Chairs:
Committee Members:
-
Eerke Boiten,
U of Kent at Canterbury, UK
-
Alex Borgida,
Rutgers U., USA
-
Jan Chomicki, U of
Buffalo, USA
-
Martin Feather, NASA Jet Propulsion
Lab, USA
-
Steve Fickas, U. of
Oregon, USA
-
Carlo
Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
-
Anthony Hunter, Univerity
College London, UK
-
Tim Menzies, U. of British
Columbia, Canada
-
Bashar Nuseibeh, Open U., UK
-
Alessandra Russo, Imperial
College, UK
-
Axel van Lamsweerde,
U. Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Note: a description of the first workshop, held at ICSE-97, can be found
at http://recluse.ics.uci.edu/pub/icse-97/workshop/inconsistency.html