Second International Workshop on Practical Applications of Stochastic Modelling

PASM'05

Contents

• *****PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 20TH MAY*****
• Paper submission online!
• Scope
• Programme and proceedings
• Registration - now open! Link updated 12/04/2005
• Important dates
• Location
• Invited speaker - updated 21/02/2005
• Publication
• Instructions to authors
• Programme Committee
• Links

Scope of Workshop

We encourage papers which apply current well-developed formalisms (stochastic Petri nets, stochastic process algebras, layered queueing networks, etc) to real-world case-studies. These studies might be of traditional web-service, GRID or computer architectures but also we strongly encourage studies from inter-disciplinary collaborations, such as biological and physical systems.

The common link is to see how researchers from diverse fields have overcome the problem of modelling large concurrent and stochastic communicating systems to obtain the particular style of stochastic metric that is important to their field.

Successful contributions may have demonstrated some novel theoretic advance to model their system or will have been diligent in constructing a detailed and realistic stochastic or probabilistic model and carried the modelling through to the analysis phase. Extra credit will be given for models which are backed up by experiment or simulation.

The aim is to end up with a collection of papers which could be used as outstanding examples of modelling practice in the field of stochastic modelling and exhibit all phases of the modelling lifecycle.

Some suggested topics on which we would encourage submission, are listed below. This is by no means an exhaustive list and any paper in the general area of the conference scope would be warmly welcomed.

• Case-study analysis using stochastic paradigms and novel analytic variations on those paradigms to enable better practical analysis, e.g.:
  • stochastic process algebras
  • stochastic Petri nets
  • layered queueing networks
  • stochastic automata networks
  • queueing networks
  • fluid stochastic Petri nets

• Specific interdisciplinary topics that we would be particularly interested to hear from include application of systematic probabilistic or stochastic analysis techniques to, for instance:
  • biological/epidemiological models
  • GRID performance and scalability
  • models of computer virus/worm infection
  • spatial modelling of chemical/nuclear reactions
  • decision making, planning and scheduling
  • geophysical models of large dynamical systems: e.g. weather/ocean systems, lava flows

• Stochastic and probabilistic models from computing areas such as:
  • web-services
  • distributed and fault-tolerant systems
  • adhoc wireless communication systems
  • embedded systems
  • safety-critical systems
  • computer architecture

Accepted papers for PASM 2005

• "Observing the Internet with a small network telescope"; Uli Harder, Matt Johnson, William Knottenbelt, Jeremy Bradley (Imperial College London, UK)
• "Analytical Modeling for Operating System Schedulers on NUMA Systems";Paulo Fernandes, Rafael Chanin, Mônica Corrêa, Afonso Sales, Avelino F. Zorzo (Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and Hewlet Packard, Brazil)
• "Applying a Stochastic Model to a Dynamic QoS Enabled Web Services Hosting Environment"; Charles Kubicek (University of Newcastle, UK)
• "Automatic Parameterisation of Stochastic Petri Net Models of Biological Networks"; Oliver Shaw, Jason Steggles, Anil Wipat (University of Newcastle, UK)
• "Stochastic simulation methods applied to a secure electronic voting model"; Jeremy Bradley, Stephen Gilmore (Imperial College London, UK; University of Edinburgh, UK)
• "Estimating the cost of native method calls for resource-bounded functional progamming languages"; Stephen Gilmore, Olha Shkaravska (University of Edinburgh, UK; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, Germany)
• "Process algebraic non-product-forms for quantitative software models"; Pete Harrison (Imperial College London, UK)
• "Convergence Routing under Bursty Traffic: Instability and an AIMD Controller"; Jean-Michel Fourneau and David Nott (PRiSM, Universitie de Versailles, France)

Important dates

• Extended paper submission deadline: 20th May 2005
• Notification to authors: 14th June 2005
• Camera-ready deadline: 5th July 2005 (HARD DEADLINE)
• Workshop: 18th July 2005
• CRC deadline for ENTCS proceedings: 23rd September 2005

Workshop location

PASM'05 is collocated with FM 2005 and will be in the "Research Beehive" (formerly called The Old Library Building) at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

The venue is situated in the centre of the main university campus, only a few minutes from Haymarket Metro and the city centre.

Travel directions to The University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Invited speaker

An invited talk will be presented by Dr Jane Hillston of the University of Edinburgh. Jane is well known in the performance community for her work on stochastic process algebra. She is the inventor of the PEPA process algebra and her PhD thesis on PEPA won the BCS distinguished dissertation award in 1995. In 2004 Jane became first recipient of the Roger Needham Award for outstanding British computer research. Jane is currently a reader in the School of Informatics within the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh.

Publication

The proceedings of PASM'05 will appear as an issue of Elsevier's ENTCS (Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science). This will appear after the workshop.

Instructions to authors

Electronic paper submission: now available

Papers should be original work of between 15 and 20 pages long, including figures and bibliography, and in single-column format. Submission is required in uncompressed Postscript or PDF format. Word files cannot be accepted.

Programme Committee

• Marco Bernardo, IT
• Jeremy Bradley, UK (co-chair)
• Mario Bravetti, IT
• Gianfranco Ciardo, US
• Tod Courtney, US
• David Daly, US
• Dan Deavours, US
• Paulo Fernandes, Brazil
• Tony Field, UK
• Stephen Gilmore, UK
• Boudewijn Haverkort, NL
• Graham Horton, DE
• William Knottenbelt, UK (co-chair)
• Pieter Kritzinger, SA
• Isi Mitrani, UK
• Gethin Norman, UK
• Mohamed Ould-Khaoua, UK
• Dave Parker, UK
• Nigel Thomas, UK (general chair)
• Aad van Moorsel, UK

Workshop organisers

Links

• PASM 2004
• FM 2005, University of Newcastle, 18-22 July
• UK Performance Engineering Workshop (UKPEW) 2005, Newcastle, 14-15 July
• Formal Aspects of Security & Trust (FAST 2005), Newcastle, 18-19 July
• Workshop on Rigorous Engineering of Fault Tolerant Systems, Newcastle, 19 July