Towards interaction reliability in concurrent applications

Developing trustworthy concurrent applications is a seemingly never ending quest, which is necessary but difficult. It is necessary because mainstream systems and applications are inherently concurrent and they are pervasive to our daily life activities. It is difficult because such systems are inherently interactive and heterogeneous, so that boundaries can hardly be established for studying subsystems in isolation. Formal methods are a key instrument in resolving ambiguities and design reliable applications in a rigorous way. The authors overview major problems in the application of formal methods and outline how they are tackled by the papers collected in this volume.