6th Workshop on
Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems
(MARS 2024)

The MARS workshops bring together researchers from different communities who are developing formal models of real systems in areas where complex models occur, such as networks, cyber-physical systems, hardware/software codesign, biology, etc. The motivation and aim for MARS stem from the following two observations:

• Large case studies are essential to show that specification formalisms and modelling techniques are applicable to real systems, whereas many research papers only consider toy examples or tiny case studies.
• Developing an accurate model of a real system takes a large amount of time, often months or years. In most scientific papers, however, salient details of the model need to be skipped due to lack of space, and to leave room for formal verification methodologies and results.

The MARS workshops aim at remedying these issues, emphasising modelling over verification, so as to retain lessons learnt from formal modelling, which are not usually discussed elsewhere. Examples are:

• Which formalism was chosen, and why?
• Which abstractions have been made, and why?
• How were important characteristics of the system modelled?
• Were there any complications while modelling the system?
• Which measures were taken to guarantee the accuracy of the model?
• How can different modelling approaches be compared on this system?

We thus invite papers that present formal models of real systems, which may lay the basis for future analysis and comparison.

In addition to the workshop proceedings, the formal models presented at the workshop will be archived in the MARS Repository, a growing, diverse collection of realistic benchmarks. The existence of this repository is a unique feature that makes MARS contributions available to the wider community, so that others can reproduce experiments, perform further analyses, and try the same case studies using different formal methods.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three referees based on their novelty, relevance, and technical merit. The MARS proceedings will be published in the open-access EPTCS series (Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science).

Submissions must be unpublished and not be submitted for publication elsewhere. It is accepted, however, to submit a paper about a case study already mentioned at another conference, workshop, or journal provided that: (1) the formal model is submitted to MARS 2024 and has not been published previously, and (2) the MARS submission adds significant, novel material concerning the formal modelling work.

Submissions must be in English and submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. Contributions are limited to 12 pages EPTCS style (not counting references and the appendices). Appendices (of arbitrary length, included in the proceedings) can be added to present all details of a formal model.

We welcome submissions that come together with one or many formal models that can be processed by some tool (e.g., timed automata for Uppaal, definitions and proofs for Isabelle/HOL, etc.). Such models should be complete (i.e., self-contained) and made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The models associated to accepted papers will be made available in the MARS Repository. A URL to the formal models should be provided along with the submission.

Submission:	Monday, 15 January, 2024
Notification:	Saturday, 24 February, 2024
Final version:	Monday, 11 March, 2024
Workshop:	Saturday, 6 April, 2024 (as part of ETAPS 2024)

As mentioned above, we invite papers that present full models of real systems, which may lay the basis for future formal analysis. The full CFP can be found here.

MARS 2024 is part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2024). Information about venue and travelling in/to Luxembourg can be found at the webpage of ETAPS.

All questions about the workshop should be emailed to the PC chairs Frédéric Lang and Matthias Volk at mars2024@mars-workshop.org