Guest Editorial for the Special Issue on FORmal methods for the quantitative Evaluation of Collective Adaptive SysTems (FORECAST)

Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) consist of a large number of spatially distributed heterogeneous entities with decentralized control and varying degrees of complex autonomous behavior that may be competing for shared resources even when collaborating to reach common goals. It is important to carry out thorough quantitative modeling and analysis and verification of their design to investigate all aspects of their behavior before they are put into operation. This requires combinations of formal methods (e.g., stochastic process algebras and associated verification techniques, such as quantitative model checking) and applied mathematics (e.g., mean field/continuous approximation and control theory) which, moreover, scale to large-scale CAS. In this context, the FORECAST workshop on FORmal methods for the quantitative Evaluation of Collective Adaptive SysTems—held in Vienna (Austria) on July 8, 2016 as a satellite event of the 4th federated event on Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF 2016)—was organized to raise awareness in the software engineering and formal methods communities of the particularities of CAS, and the design and control problems that they bring. The guest editors of this special issue served as co-chairs of the workshop’s Program Committee and were responsible for its proceedings [4]. FORECAST was sponsored by the FP7-ICT-600708 European project QUANTICOL (A Quantitative Approach to Management and Design of Collective and Adaptive Behaviours), that ran from 2013 to 2017 [3, 5, 7]. We thank the project’s participants and in particular its coordinator, Jane Hillston, for entrusting us with the workshop’s organization.