Aims and Topics

The complexity of modern software systems is continuously growing together with the communication capabilities and computational power of pervasive technology, embodied by a wide range of interacting heterogeneous smart devices.

This new scenario is posing serious challenges to software development, which hardly keeps pace with this technological evolution. Sophisticated frameworks exposed through application programming interfaces, or directly integrated with mainstream programming languages provide partial solutions to support big data streaming and complex analytic; dynamic, autonomous, and collective coordination and adaptation capabilities; emergent behavior in cooperating systems; Internet of Things (IoT) systems development and maintenance; and employment of cloud platforms and parallel architectures, in particular heterogeneous ones.

This calls for new abstractions, features, middlewares and tools able to reduce the time, effort, and cost of designing and developing the next generation software systems, improving performance, and ensuring reliability and security.

To this aim, NGPS is seeking to advance the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice of computational models and paradigms, formal techniques and software methods for easing software development and verification, and improving efficiency of complex modern systems.

The specific topics of interest for the NGPS track include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Integration of computational paradigms
• Runtime verification and monitoring
• Platforms for the Cloud
• IoT systems
• Secure and dependable software
• Formal models and verification
• Testing and debugging
• System evaluation
• Design, implementation and optimization of high-level programming languages
• Middleware platforms
• Scenarios, case studies and experience reports on innovative applications
• High-level parallel programming
• Distributed systems and concurrency
• Development tools
• Coordination models, specification, and technologies
• Multi-agent systems, mobile agents, intelligent agents, and agent-based simulations
• Models, frameworks and tools for Collective Adaptive Systems
• Internet, Web, and pervasive computing systems
• Self-organizing, self-adaptive, context-aware and nature-inspired systems
• Security, trust and privacy management