Co-located with the International Joint Conferences On Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS 2026).
April 11, 2026
Turin, Italy
The MISSION workshop focuses on modeling, analyzing, and verifying space missions across various domains, including networks, robotics, and intermittently connected systems. The workshop provides a platform for researchers and practitioners to present formal methods, tools, and theoretical foundations enabling correct-by-construction behavior in systems where time, synchronization, and determinism are challenged. It is organized as a concluding event of the EU Horizon 2020 project “MISSION”, leveraging collaborations across academia and industry. The event will foster discussion, demos, and community building around applied formal analysis of asynchronous or disconnected space systems operating in uncertain environments.
We will invite extended abstracts and position papers (4–6 pages). More information will be published soon.
Papers must follow the EPTCS LaTeX Style (single-column, 11pt font) and should be submitted in PDF format through our EDAS submission portal.
There is a growing interest in the space community for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for Earth observation, as well as the deployment of networked, large-scale LEO constellations. Their purpose is to provide worldwide connectivity and continuous awareness of the Earth’s surface via real-time imaging.
This trend is made possible by recent technological breakthroughs. It is accelerated by the utilisation of cost-efficient and performant commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in near-Earth orbit. This comes with a disruptive change in the culture of developing space objects. Since the early days of the space sector, resilience and reliability assurance have dominated over cost considerations. But nowadays, the attitude (at least for the LEO market) is reversed, so cost considerations dominate.
These advances in technology create numerous opportunities for new business models as well as for research advancements. At the same time, they pose several striking challenges that share a common ground. (1) Due to size and weight limitations, the operation of LEO satellites rests on a delicate balance of the available resources, especially concerning power consumption and data handling. (2) The classical resilience and reliability assurance methods have not been adapted to the new situation where COTS-based systems dominate and development times are much shorter than in earlier days. (3) Data transfer across terrestrial systems requires the development of novel link and network protocols capable of coping with limited bandwidth, latency variations, and highly dynamic topologies. (4) These three challenges intertwine in upcoming satellite constellations and mega-constellations, and require an integrated consideration and validation.
The common ground of these challenges is that they are, at their core, computational problems. It is clear that a promising way to tackle these and other concrete problems of the future space domain requires expertise in state-of-the-art model-based computational methods and software tools. The MISSION (Models in Space Systems: Integration, Operation, and Networking) project has focused on these problems and invites the formal methods community to discuss, communicate, and learn about the foundations, formal techniques, and software tools applied to advances in space technology.
Thus, the workshop is organized as the concluding event of the EU Horizon 2020 project MISSION, with a twofold aim: to invite researchers to contribute their ongoing ideas and to disseminate the project results to the ETAPS community.
Organized by: Arnd Hartmanns, Thomas Noll, Pedro R. D’Argenio, and Juan A. Fraire
For questions about paper submissions, registration, or general inquiries, please contact the organizing committee: