MARS 2026

Submission timeline

• 11 Feb 2026 Full paper AoE 21 Jan 2026 → 11 Feb 2026 +21 days
• 11 Mar 2026 Notification

• 12 Apr 2026 Conference opens

What to submit

Format

15 pages EPTCS + references

Proceedings

EPTCS — CC BY-ND

Chairs and
invited speakers

Mixed genders How this is counted

Co-located with

Satellite of ETAPS.

In addition to the workshop proceedings, the formal models presented at the workshop will be archived in the MARS Repository.

Call for papers

• After a deadline extension MARS-2026-extended.txt · TXT · shown below
• As first published MARS-2026.txt · TXT

The call, as published

Reproduced verbatim from the organisers’ announcement, after a deadline extension. The conference’s own page is at mars-workshop.org/mars2026/.

MARS 2026 - CALL FOR PAPERS - Turin (Italy) - April 12th, 2026

                           Call for Papers

              Models for Formal Analysis of Real Systems
                             (MARS 2026)

                           April 12th, 2026
                     Affiliated with ETAPS 2026

                 http://mars-workshop.org/mars2026/


The MARS workshops bring together researchers from different
communities who are developing formal models of real systems in areas
where complex models occur, such as networks, cyber-physical systems,
hardware/software codesign, biology, etc.
The motivation and aim for MARS stem 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
   research 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 scientific 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.

The MARS workshops aim at remedying these issues, emphasising modelling
over verification, so as to retain lessons learnt from formal
modelling, which are not usually discussed elsewhere. Examples are:

 * Which formalism was chosen, and why?
 * Which abstractions have been made, and why?
 * How were important characteristics of the system modelled?
 * Were there any complications while modelling the system?
 * Which measures were taken to guarantee the accuracy of the model?
 * How can different modelling approaches be compared on this system?

We thus invite papers that present formal models of real systems, which
may lay the basis for future analysis and comparison.

In addition to the workshop proceedings, the formal models presented at
the workshop will be archived in the MARS Repository, a growing,
diverse collection of realistic benchmarks. The existence of this
repository is a unique feature that makes MARS contributions available
to the wider community, so that others can reproduce experiments,
perform further analyses, and try the same case studies using different
formal methods.


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three referees based
on their novelty, relevance, and technical merit. The MARS proceedings
will be published in the open-access EPTCS series (Electronic
Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science).

Submissions must be unpublished and not be submitted for publication
elsewhere. It is accepted, however, to submit a paper about a case
study already mentioned at another conference, workshop, or journal
provided that: (1) the formal model is submitted to MARS 2026 and has
not been published previously, and (2) the MARS submission adds
significant, novel material concerning the formal modelling work.

Submissions must be in English and submitted in PDF format via
EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mars2026).
Contributions are limited to 12 pages EPTCS style (not
counting references and the appendices). Appendices (of arbitrary
length, included in the proceedings) can be added to present all
details of a formal model.

We welcome submissions that come together with one or many formal
models that can be processed by some tool (e.g., timed automata for
Uppaal,  definitions and proofs for Isabelle/HOL, etc.). Such models
should be complete (i.e., self-contained) and made available under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License. The models associated to accepted papers will be made
available in the MARS Repository. A URL to the formal models should be
provided along with the submission.


KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Christel Baier (Dresden University of Technology, Germany): Verification meets causality

José Proença (University of Porto, Portugal): Analysing Real (Time) Systems with Uppaal, Spreadsheets, and Lince


IMPORTANT DATES (AoE)

 * Submission: Wednesday, February 11th 2026 (extended)
 * Notification: Wednesday, March 11th 2026
 * Final version: Wednesday, March 25th 2026
 * Workshop: Sunday, April 12, 2026


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Davide Basile (CNR-ISTI, Italy)
Maurice ter Beek (CNR-ISTI, Italy, co-chair)
Thao Dang (Verimag and Université Grenoble Alpes, France)
Clemens Dubslaff (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Gregor Gössler (INRIA, France, co-chair)
John Hatcliff (Kansas State University, USA)
Lina Marsso (University of Toronto, Canada)
Juliane Päßler (University of Oslo, Norway)
José Proença (CISTER and University of Porto, Portugal)
Anne Remke (University of Münster, Germany)
Cristina Seceleanu (Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Lijun Zhang (Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)


VENUE AND TRAVEL INFORMATION

MARS 2026 is part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and
Practice of Software (ETAPS 2026). Information about venue and
travelling to Turin can be found at the webpage of ETAPS.


WORKSHOP ORGANISERS AND CONTACT

All questions about the workshop should be emailed to Maurice ter Beek
and Gregor Gössler at mars2026@mars-workshop.org.