call for papers - QAC'08

[Sun Meng <M.Sun@cwi.nl>]

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Call for papers

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     International Workshop on Quality Aspects of Coordination (QAC 2008)
                          http://www.cwi.nl/qac08

                     August 31, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey
                       Co-located with ICTAC 2008
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Important dates:

Abstract submission deadline: June 20, 2008.
Submission deadline:          June 27, 2008.
Acceptance notification:      July 21, 2008.
Camera ready version due:     July 31, 2008.
Workshop:                     August 31, 2008.
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Overview and Topics of Interest

Modeling, analysis, and ensuring end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) 
represent key concerns in large-scale distributed applications. 
Deregulation and increased competition in the telecommunications 
industry mean that, increasingly, providers use components and
services offered by multiple vendors to compose such applications. This 
highlights the conspicuous absence of compositional models of QoS that 
reflect their underlying architecture of component/service composition.

Connectors have emerged as a powerful concept for composition and 
coordination of concurrent activities encapsulated as components and 
services. Compositional coordination models and languages serve as a 
means to formally specify and implement component and service 
connectors. They support large-scale distributed applications by 
allowing construction of complex component connectors out of simpler 
ones. A promising approach to support compositional models of QoS 
involves augmenting connector models to reflect and account for the QoS 
properties of composed systems. This presents an emerging area of 
research with potential high impact. Dynamic changes in a distributed 
environment may lead to scarcity of resources (e.g., bandwidth, CPU 
cycles, and memory), and cause perceptible degradation of QoS of a 
running application. Offering performance guarantees to satisfy
users' end-to-end QoS requirements raises additional challenges for 
component connectors. It involves monitoring fluctuations that can 
trigger such degradations, and escalating them to the proper 
architectural levels where actors can take counter-measures such as
substitution of alternate components and services from other vendors.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for international experts 
to discuss issues related to coordination and compositional models of 
connectors with QoS guarantees in large-scale distributed systems. 
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    * Theoretical models (probabilistic, timed, stochastic, 
quantitative) of QoS aspects
    * Compositional QoS models
    * Specification and modeling formalisms and methodologies (process 
algebra, petri nets, automata, Markov Chains, quantitative UML, etc.)
    * Quantitative models for connectors, coordination, components and 
services composition, architectures with QoS
    * Modeling and analysis of trade-offs along different QoS dimensions
    * Relation between QoS in adjacent architectural layers
    * QoS issues in web services, multi-agent systems and 
component-based systems
    * Performance metrics of systems (response time, reliability, 
availability, safety, security, survivability, efficiency, etc.)
    * QoS-sensitive monitoring and adaptation mechanisms
    * Dynamic reconfiguration
    * Quantitative model checking
    * Testing quantitative models
    * Numerical evaluation, simulation and verification of 
non-functional properties
    * Schedulability analysis
    * Relation between Resource Management and QoS
    * Experience with QoS in coordination (case studies and tools)

Program Committee (tentative)

    * Bernhard Aichernig, TU Graz, Austria
    * Farhad Arbab, CWI and Leiden University, The Netherlands (Chair)
    * Christel Baier, University of Dresden, Germany
    * Luis Barbosa, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
    * Tom Chothia, CWI, The Netherlands
    * Rocco De Nicola, Universita' di Firenze, Italy
    * Dang Van Hung, Institute of Information Technology, Vietnam
    * Marta Kwiatkowska, Oxford University, UK
    * Zhiming Liu, UNU-IIST, Macao
    * Antonia Lopes, University of Lisbon, Portugal
    * Rob Van der Mei, CWI and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The 
Netherlands
    * Sun Meng, CWI, The Netherlands (Chair)
    * Ugo Montanari, University of Pisa, Italy
    * Jun Pang, Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg
    * Emilio Tuosto, University of Leicester, UK
    * Wang Yi, Uppsala University, Sweden


Submission and Proceedings

A submitted paper must contain original contributions, clearly written 
in English. Papers should not exceed 15 pages in ENTCS format. The 
workshop proceedings is planning to be published in Electronic Notes in 
Theoretical Computer Science, Elsevier, as post-proceedings; in 
addition, informal workshop proceedings will be handed out to 
participants during the workshop. If there are enough high quality 
submissions, publication of selected best papers in a special issue
of a leading international journal is also under consideration.

Submissions must not have been published or be concurrently considered 
for publication elsewhere. All submissions will be reviewed by at least 
three members of the program committee. The final version of the papers 
must be prepared in LaTeX, adhering to the ENTCS format instructions.

Submissions should be done using the EasyChair service from the website.