The 11th International Symposium on Dependable Software Engineering: Theories, Tools and Applications (SETTA 2025), will be held in Oxford, United Kingdom, on 1-3 December 2025. The event will be hosted at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford.

Formal methods emerged as an important area in computer science and software engineering about half a century ago. An international community has formed researching, developing and teaching formal theories, techniques and tools for software modeling, specification, design and verification. However, the impact of formal methods on the quality and improvement of software systems is, in practice, lagging behind. This is for instance reflected by the challenges in applying formal techniques and tools to engineering large-scale systems such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet-of-Things (IoT), Enterprise Systems, Cloud-Based Systems, and so forth.

The purpose of the SETTA symposium is to bring international researchers together to exchange research results and ideas on bridging the gap between formal methods and software engineering. It aims at academic excellence and its objective is to become a flagship conference on formal software engineering in Asia. All previous instances of SETTA have taken place in Asia and 2025 is the first time the conference is being held outside its traditional home region.

To achieve these goals and contribute to the sustainability of the formal methods research, it is important for the symposium to attract young researchers into the community. Thus, this symposium particularly encourages the participation of young researchers and students.

Authors are invited to submit papers on original research, industrial applications, or position papers proposing challenges in fundamental research and technology. The latter two types of submissions are expected to contribute to the development of formal methods and applications thereof in software engineering. This is done by either substantiating the advantages of integrating formal methods into the development cycle or through delineating the need for research by demonstrating weaknesses of existing technologies, especially when addressing new application domains.

All submissions must be in pdf format. Papers should be written in English. Submitted papers must be unpublished and not submitted for publication elsewhere. The review process is double-blind and each submission will be reviewed by at least two members of the technical program committee. All accepted papers will have to be presented at the conference by one of their authors. As in previous iterations of SETTA, extended versions of selected papers will be recommended to special issues of a reputable journal (TBA) after the proceedings of the conference.

Topics and Scope

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    Requirements specification and analysis
    Formalisms for modeling, design and implementation
    Model checking, theorem proving, and decision procedures
    Scalable approaches to formal system analysis
    Formal approaches to simulation, run-time verification, and testing
    Integration of formal methods into software engineering practice
    Contract-based engineering of components, systems, and systems of systems
    Formal and engineering aspects of software evolution and maintenance
    Parallel and multicore programming
    Embedded, real-time, hybrid, probabilistic, and cyber-physical systems
    Mixed-critical applications and systems
    Formal aspects of service-oriented and cloud computing
    Safety, reliability, robustness, and fault-tolerance
    Dependability of smart software and systems
    Empirical analysis techniques and integration with formal methods
    Applications and industrial experience reports
    Software tools to assist the construction or analysis of software systems
    Trustwothy and explainable AI