Formal methods for developing computing systems have been extensively researched and their use in industry is increasing. Recent applications to the development of mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical systems have significantly increased trustworthiness, without increasing overall development costs.

The challenge now is to achieve general acceptance of formal methods as a part of industrial development of high quality systems, particularly trusted systems. More needs to be known about merging formal methods into industrial engineering practice, including new and emerging practice. This includes increasing productivity of formal engineering methods, for example through improved tool support.

ICFEM 2003 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from industry, academia, and government to advance the state of the art in formal engineering methods and to encourage wider uptake of formal methods in industry. Submissions related to the following principal themes are encouraged, but any topics relevant to the field of formal methods and their support environments will also be considered:

The ICFEM 2003 Program Committee selects original technical papers for publication in the proceedings of the conference to be published by Springer in its Lecturer Notes in Computer Science series.

Some selected best papers may be considered for a special issue in the Formal Aspects of Computing journal (Springer).