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Novel computing paradigms, e.g., the Cloud, introduce new requirements with regard to access control such as utilization of historical information and continuity of decision. However, these concepts may introduce an additional level of complexity to the underpinning model, rendering its definition and verification a cumbersome and prone to errors process. Using a formal language to specify a model and formally verify it may lead to a rigorous definition of the interactions amongst its components, and the provision of formal guarantees for its correctness. In this paper, we consider a case study where we specify a formal model in TLA + for both a policy-neutral and policy-specific UseCON usage control model. Through that, we anticipate to shed light in the analysis and verification of usage control models and policies by sharing our experience when using TLA + specific tools.

Pregnancy-associated breast cancer (PABC) is a relatively rare but clinically significant condition. Diagnosis is often delayed, as physiological breast changes during pregnancy can obscure malignant findings, resulting in more advanced disease at presentation. PABC poses unique diagnostic and therapeutic challenges due to its rarity and the complexity of managing maternal and fetal health. This case highlights these challenges in a 35-year-old woman at 30 weeks of gestation who presented with a large, painful left breast mass. Open biopsy confirmed grade 3, triple-negative, infiltrating ductal carcinoma. Axillary lymphadenopathy was present, and staging revealed liver, bone, and lung metastases. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy was administered, followed two weeks after the last dose by cesarean delivery at 37+5 weeks, resulting in the birth of a healthy infant without complications. Despite the initial response to treatment, the disease progressed three months later. Molecular therapy was subsequently administered, but the patient ultimately succumbed 16 months after the initial diagnosis. Current guidelines do not recommend routine breast examinations during antenatal care; however, this case underscores the importance of breast evaluation during pregnancy as both a medical and psychological imperative.

Formal methods and tools have become well established and widely applied to ensure the correctness of fundamental components of industrial critical systems in domains like railways, avionics and automotive. In this Introduction to the special issue, we outline a number of recent achievements concerning the use of formal methods and tools for the specification and verification of critical systems from a variety of industrial domains. These achievements are represented by four properly revised and extended versions of papers that were selected from the 26th International Conference on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems (FMICS 2021).

The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60 % from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019).

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE'21, the 14th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, which was held online on the 18th of June 2021, as a satellite event of DisCoTec'21. The ICE workshop series features a distinguishing review and selection procedure, allowing PC members to interact anonymously with authors. As in the past 13 editions, this interaction considerably improved the accuracy of the feedback from the reviewers and the quality of accepted papers, and offered the basis for lively discussion during the workshop. The 2021 edition of ICE included double blind reviewing of original research papers, in order to increase fairness and avoid bias in reviewing. Each paper was reviewed by three or four PC members, and altogether 5 papers were accepted for publication - plus 4 oral presentations which are not part of this volume. We were proud to host 2 invited talks, by Laura Bocchi and Helene Coullon. The abstracts of these talks are included in this volume together with the regular papers. The final versions of the contributions, taking into account the discussion at the workshop, are included.

Runtime verification (RV) has the potential to enable the safe operation of safety-critical systems that are too complex to formally verify, such as Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) applications. Writing correct monitors can itself be complex, and errors in the monitoring subsystem threaten the mission as a whole. This paper provides an overview of a formal approach to generating runtime monitors for autonomous robots from requirements written in a structured natural language. Our approach integrates the Formal Requirement Elicitation Tool (FRET) with Copilot, a runtime verification framework, through the Ogma integration tool. FRET is used to specify requirements with unambiguous semantics, which are then automatically translated into temporal logic formulae. Ogma generates monitor specifications from the FRET output, which are compiled into hard-real time C99. To facilitate integration of the monitors in ROS2, we have extended Ogma to generate ROS2 packages defining monitoring nodes, which run the monitors when new data becomes available, and publish the results of any violations. The goal of our approach is to treat the generated ROS2 packages as black boxes and integrate them into larger ROS2 systems with minimal effort.

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE'20, the 13th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, which was held online on the 19th of June 2020, as a satellite event of DisCoTec'20. The ICE workshop series features a distinguishing review and selection procedure, allowing PC members to interact anonymously with authors. As in the past 12 editions, this interaction considerably improved the accuracy of the feedback from the reviewers and the quality of accepted papers, and offered the basis for lively discussion during the workshop. The 2020 edition of ICE included double blind reviewing of original research papers, in order to increase fairness and avoid bias in reviewing. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, and altogether 5 papers were accepted for publication - plus 5 oral presentations which are not part of this volume. We were proud to host 2 invited talks, by Cinzia Di Giusto and Karoliina Lehtinen. The abstracts of these talks are included in this volume together with the regular papers. The final versions of the contributions, taking into account the discussion at the workshop, are included.

The Behavior-Interaction-Priority (BIP) framework, rooted in rigorous semantics, allows the construction of systems that are correct-by-design. BIP has been effectively used for the construction and analysis of large systems such as robot controllers and satellite on-board software. Nevertheless, the specification of BIP models is done in a purely textual manner without any code editor support. To facilitate the specification of BIP models, we present DesignBIP, a web-based, collaborative, version-controlled design studio. To promote model scaling and reusability of BIP models, we use a graphical language for modeling parameterized BIP models with rigorous semantics. We present the various services provided by the design studio, including model editors, code editors, consistency checking mechanisms, code generators, and integration with the JavaBIP tool-set.

Usage control models provide an integration of access control, digital rights, and trust management. To achieve this integration, usage control models support additional concepts such as attribute mutability and continuity of decision. However, these concepts may introduce an additional level of complexity to the underlying model, rendering its definition a cumbersome and prone to errors process. Applying a formal verification technique allows for a rigorous analysis of the interactions amongst the components, and thus for formal guarantees in respect of the correctness of a model. In this paper, we elaborate on a case study, where we express the high-level functional model of the UseCON usage control model in the TLA+ formal specification language, and verify its correctness for <=12 uses in both of its supporting authorisation models.