Introduction to Selected Papers from SPIN 2017

Excerpt

The 24th International SPIN Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN 2017) [2] took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on July 13 and 14, 2017. The symposium brought together researchers working in automated, tool-based techniques for the analysis, verification, and validation of software systems, models, and programs. In this special issue, we bring to you extended versions of selected papers from the symposium. To assemble the issue, we issued invitations to the seven most favorably reviewed papers from SPIN 2017. The authors of five of these papers accepted the invitation. Each submission subsequently went through the regular review process of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer, requiring three reviews per paper. We used the reviewers of the original papers when we could, and supplemented this set with additional reviewers when necessary. The five papers published in this special issue are the result of this process and represent the diversity of SPIN 2017, combining theoretical and practical contributions. They address efficient, novel, and realistic ways of performing program synthesis and model checking. The first three selections each directly target a different practical concern, and the last two make a theoretical contribution, but with a practical impact. …