Focusing on applied formal methods, the final seminar program covered a wide range of applied research spanning from theoretical and methodological foundations to practical applications of Abstract State Machines, B, and beyond, emphasizing universal methods and tools that, regardless of their application orientation, are still committed to the ideal of mathematical rigor.

Two overarching themes were the persistent demand to

• foster further cross-fertilization between academic research and industrial development in the quest for innovative methods and tools to critically evaluate their potential in the light of new challenges as posed by new technological developments and paradigms in software engineering, and the ever-present question of
• convergence of methods, clarifying their commonalities and differences to better understand how to combine related approaches for accomplishing the various tasks in modeling, simulation, and verification of complex hardware/software systems.

For the dissemination of results, revised and refereed versions of major contributions to the seminar will be collected over the Summer 2006. Springer-Verlag kindly agreed to publish the proceedings as LNCS Festschrift.

Acknowledgement

The seminar has been organized in collaboration with Bertrand Meyer from ETH Zürich, who had to withdraw his participation for purely personal reasons in January 2006.