17th NASA Formal Methods Symposium

(NFM’25) 

11-13 June 2025 

Williamsburg, VA 

Call for Papers 

Symposium Theme 

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and in the aerospace industry requires advanced technologies to address their specification, design, verification, validation, and certification. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, other government agencies, academia, and industry, with the goal of identifying challenges and providing solutions towards achieving assurance for such critical systems. The focus of this symposium is on formal techniques for software and system assurance for applications in space, aviation, robotics, and other NASA-relevant critical systems.  

Topics of Interest 

• Advances in Formal Methods – Formal verification, model checking, and static analysis; interactive and automated theorem proving; program and specification synthesis, code transformation and generation; run-time verification and test case generation; techniques and algorithms for scaling formal methods; design for verification and correct-by-design techniques; requirements generation, specification, and validation. 

• Integration of Formal Methods – Use of ML techniques in formal methods; integration of formal methods and software engineering; integration of diverse formal methods techniques; integration of formal methods with simulation, analysis, and test approaches. 

• Formal Methods in Practice – Experience reports on applications of formal methods in industry; use of formal methods in education; applications of formal methods to concurrent and distributed systems, human-machine systems, autonomous systems, and fault-detection, diagnostics, and prognostics systems. 

Submission 

There are two categories of submissions: 

• Regular papers – Up to 15 pages plus references. Regular papers describe fully developed work and complete results. 

• Short papers — Up to 6 pages plus references. Short papers describe either novel and publicly available tools, case studies detailing applications of formal methods, or new emerging ideas in the topics of interest. 

All papers should be in English and describe original work that has not been published or submitted elsewhere. Authors of accepted papers must present their work in person at the conference. 

NFM prohibits the use of generative AI to create the textual narrative of the paper. However, the use of generative AI to create examples (such as text, tables, graphics, and code) that support the paper is permitted, but this must be disclosed in the paper. Basic word processing systems that recommend and insert replacement text, perform spelling or grammar checks and corrections, or systems that do language translations need not be disclosed in the paper. 

All submissions will be fully reviewed by members of the Program Committee. NFM is currently arranging to publish accepted regular and short papers in the Formal Methods subline of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors should therefore use the LNCS style formatting described at https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines. Papers must be submitted in PDF format through EasyChair.

Important Dates 

Note: An abstract MUST be submitted by the abstract due date for a paper to be considered.

Location and Cost 

The symposium will be hosted by the Computer Science Department at the College of William & Mary, in historic Williamsburg, VA. Williamsburg is located about 150 miles south of Washington, D.C., and midway between Richmond and Norfolk on Interstate 64. It is home to an award-winning theme park, several recreation opportunities and the world's largest living history museum. For information about visiting the William & Mary campus, including lodging options, see www.wm.edu/about/visiting/ 

There will be no registration fee charged to participants. All interested individuals, including non-US citizens, are welcome to attend, listen to the talks, and participate in discussions. However, all attendees must register.