Much of the new work in this area is being pursued by people from quite distinct fields, who rarely have an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas directly. These groups include, for instance, verification tool builders, logicians, semantics researchers, and process algebra specialists.

This workshop aims to bring the people from these different disciplines together. The discussion at the workshop will be focused on the following three main topics:

• Experience with the application of verification methods and tools based on partial-order semantics and partial-order reduction techniques.
• Formal description techniques, logics and algebras, based on partial orders.
• Formal specification methods where partial-order semantics are more natural than interleaving semantics.

The workshop will be two and a half days, ending at early afternoon on the last day. It will include invited talks from both practitioners of partial-order methods in verification, and from theoreticians in the areas related to the conference: model-checking, logic, semantics, process algebras.

The proceedings of the workshop will be published in the AMS-DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science. Preprints of presented papers and short presentation position statements will be available at the workshop. The workshop will include a tool demonstration.

Organizers: Doron Peled (Bell Labs), doron@research.att.com; Gerard Holzmann (Bell Labs), gerard@research.att.com; Vaughan Pratt (Stanford University), pratt@cs.stanford.edu.

Sponsors: Bell Labs, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Updated information will be posted to the theory newsgroup and also announced via the workshop web page.

The POMIV'96 workshop will take place in New Jersey as part of the DIMACS Special Year on Logic and Algorithms, one of whose focus areas is computer-aided verification. The workshop is part of a series of workshops on formal methods and verification. Click here for more information.