Conclusions

The 4th South-East European Workshop on Formal Methods (SEEFM'09) took place in Thessaloniki on the 5th of December. The workshop was jointly organised by CITY College (Computer Science Department) and the South-East European Research Centre (SEERC).

The theme of the workshop was twofold: 'Formal Methods for Web Services' and 'Formal Methods for Agent-based Systems'. The workshop has attracted participation from academics and researchers from all over the world. The affiliation of the 50 authors participating in the submitted papers were from 10 different countries, such as Turkey, Greece, China, New Zealand, Jordan, Thailand, Germany, Finland, and United Kingdom.

The workshop was attended by 25 participants. All participants expressed their high interest in the workshop themes and their satisfaction from the original contributions and the high quality presentations.

Keynote speeches were addressed by two distinguished speakers, NASA expert Prof. Mike Hinchey, Scientific Director of Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, and Professor of Software Engineering at University of Limerick, and IBM awarded Prof. Wolfgang Reisig, Professor at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany.

Prof. Reisig, in his keynote speech, which was entitled "Service Orientation: a Theory based Perspective", presented a formal framework for the composition of Web services with the use of Petri Nets and emphasized their importance and usefulness as a target language for specifying composition of services.

Prof. Hinchey delivered the second keynote speech entitled "Formally Specifying Autonomous and Agent-Based NASA Space Exploration Missions". In his talk Prof. Hinchey described his positive experiences working as a formal methods expert at NASA and provided an overview of work currently done towards developing future space missions. Formal methods are widely used for the development of safe systems at NASA, as NASA experts have long realized that their use can highly contribute towards the early identification of software defects.

The audience found both speeches and all presentations very enlightening and interesting.

The workshop closed with a brainstorming session and a panel discussion in which the challenges, the problems, the opportunities and the future of Formal Methods were lively discussed. All attendees were asked to list the issues that they believed to be contemporary challenges in the field. The topics were then collected and categorised, and a discussion followed concentrating on the issues most widely identified such as: persuading the industry for the importance of formal methods, educating students in formal methods, developing user-friendly industrial tools, and demonstrating the importance with the use of large-scale case studies and relevant successes.

Once more, given this opportunity, we would like to thank all the members of the Programme Committee for their significant support, the Organising Committee, which ensured the success of the workshop, the editorial staff from the IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services for their cooperation and their help during the publication process, and finally all of our colleagues from CITY College and the South-East European Research Centre for their invaluable support. Special thanks also go to Mr. Tsintziras for his artistic contribution in the development of the promotional material for the workshop. Last but not least we would like to thank our distinguished invited speakers for putting every effort to make this event unique and relevant to our intended objectives.

Dimitris Dranidis, Ioanna Stamatopoulou

Chairs of SEEFM'09