Software is increasingly becoming the main implementation tool for system functions, as well as systems integration. This leads to increases in complexity (and costs), such that it becomes exceedingly hard to exhaustively test and verify the software, such that latent faults could remain in the deployed systems. In complex heterogeneous physical systems (like spacecraft and aircraft) such situations are addressed by ‘Integrated Systems Health Management’, where the health of (sub-) systems is continuously monitored, and if anomalies are detected their source is isolated, and appropriate mitigation action is taken. Software health management applies the same concept to software, but in the context of the larger, physical system.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together interested researchers from the community and interested ‘customers’ from the government and the industry to discuss: (1) the challenges of software health management, (2) the foundations and principles for software health management, (3) early, promising technical results in this area, (4) challenge problems from real systems, and (5) new research directions. The expected outcome of the workshop is a set of short papers and presentations that outline the state of the problems, the state of the art, the challenges, and interesting new research results and directions in the area.

Submissions:

Anticipated submissions are brief position papers (extended abstracts) and not more than 3 pages long.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Foundations and principles of software health management
• Software anomaly detection
• Fault isolation for software
• Fault mitigation techniques, ranging from pre-defined to fully autonomic
• Early, promising technical directions and results
• Challenge problems from real-life systems
• Novel research directions and approaches, including model-based techniques 

The submitted papers could present new results from actual research which might be preliminary or intermediate, or report on lessons learned, or open problems.

Authors are invited to submit the extended abstract by Mar 31, 2009. Submissions should be formatted using the IEEE CS conference style, (template is available from http://smc-it.org/authorinfo.html) and are to be sent to the workshop organizer via email, in PDF form. Electronic submission will be required, except by special arrangement with the program chair. Authors will be notified of acceptance by April 18, 2009. Final, revised versions of accepted abstracts must be submitted by April 27, 2009.  

All submissions will undergo a thorough review by the program committee (at least 3 reviewers per paper). The collection of position papers of this workshop will be published on the workshop website.

Important Deadlines

Submission:  Mar 31, 2009

Notification:   Apr 18, 2009

Final version: Apr 27, 2009

Workshop:    July 21, 2009 

Program Committee

Michel Ingham, (NASA JPL)
Gabor Karsai, (Vanderbilt U.)
Michael Lowry, (NASA ARC)
Paul Miner, (NASA LaRC)
Ashok Srivastava, (NASA ARC)
Jeffrey Voas, (SAIC)
Ben Watson, (Lockheed-Martin)
Brian Williams, (MIT)

Organizer

Gabor Karsai,
Vanderbilt University, USA
gabor.karsai@vanderbilt.edu