Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems

TL;DR

The proceedings of MARS 2026 showcase research on formal modeling of complex real systems across various domains, emphasizing large case studies and detailed modeling practices.

Contribution

This collection highlights the importance of extensive case studies and detailed modeling techniques in formal analysis of real systems, addressing gaps in prior research.

Findings

Emphasizes large, real-world case studies for formal modeling.

Highlights the time-consuming nature of accurate system modeling.

Focuses on modeling lessons rather than just verification results.

Abstract

These proceedings contain the papers that were presented at the 7th Workshop on Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems (MARS 2026), which took place on 12 April 2026 in Turin, Italy, as a satellite event of the 29th International Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2026). The goal of MARS is to bring together researchers from different communities who are developing formal models of real systems in areas where complex models occur (e.g., networks, cyber-physical systems, hardware/software codesign, biology). The motivation for MARS stems from the following two observations: - Large case studies are essential to show that specification formalisms and modelling techniques are applicable to real systems, whereas many papers only consider toy examples or tiny case studies. - Developing an accurate model of a real system takes a large amount of time, often months or years. In most papers, however, salient details of the model need to be skipped due to lack of space, and to leave room for formal verification methodologies and results. MARS aims at remedying these issues, emphasising modelling over verification, so as to retain lessons learned from formal modelling, which are not usually discussed elsewhere, and which may lay the basis for future analysis and comparison.