ETAPS 2003 was the sixth instance of the European Joint Conferences on T- ory and Practice of Software. ETAPS is an annual federated conference that was establishedin1998bycombininganumberofexistingandnewconferences.This yearitcomprised?veconferences(FOSSACS,FASE,ESOP,CC,TACAS),14- tellite workshops (AVIS, CMCS, COCV, FAMAS, Feyerabend, FICS, LDTA, RSKD, SC, TACoS, UniGra, USE, WITS and WOOD), eight invited lectures (not including those that are speci?c to the satellite events), and several tu- rials. We received a record number of submissions to the ?ve conferences this year: over 500, making acceptance rates fall below 30% for every one of them. Congratulations to all the authors who made it to the ?nal program! I hope that all the other authors still found a way of participating in this exciting event and I hope you will continue submitting. A special event was held to honour the 65th birthday of Prof. Wlad Turski, one of the pioneers of our young science. The deaths of some of our ¿fathers¿ in thesummerof2002¿Dahl,DijkstraandNygaard¿remindedusthatSoftware Science and Technology is, perhaps, no longer that young. Against this sobering background, it is a treat to celebrate one of our most prominent scientists and his lifetime of achievements. It gives me particular personal pleasure that we are able to do this for Wlad during my term as chairman of ETAPS.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International
Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of
Systems, TACAS 2003, held in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2003. The 43 revised
full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions.
The papers are organized in topical sections on bounded model checking
and SAT-based methods, mu-calculus and temporal logics, verification of
parameterized systems, abstractions and counterexamples, real-time and
scheduling, security and cryptography, modules and compositional verification,
symbolic state spaces and decision diagrams, performance and mobility,
state space reductions, constraint solving and decision procedures, and
testing and verification.