NFM 2026

NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM) 2026
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California, USA
May 5-7, 2026

The 18th NASA Formal Methods Symposium (NFM 2026) will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, USA from May 5-7, 2026. The organization of NFM 2026 is being led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and University of Southern California.

Symposium Theme

The widespread use and increasing complexity of mission-critical and safety-critical systems at NASA and in the aerospace industry requires advanced technologies to address their specification, design, verification, validation, and certification. The NASA Formal Methods Symposium is a forum to foster collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners from NASA, other government agencies, academia, and industry, with the goal of identifying challenges and providing solutions towards achieving assurance for such critical systems. The focus of this symposium is on formal techniques for software and system assurance for applications in space, aviation, robotics, and other NASA-relevant critical systems.

Topics of Interest

Core Formal Methods: Formal verification techniques like interactive and automated theorem proving, SAT/SMT solvers, model checking, and static analysis; logic-based specification formalisms; program and specification synthesis, code transformation and generation; runtime verification and test case generation; scenario-based testing; probabilistic/statistical methods; techniques and algorithms for scaling formal methods; design for verification and correct-by-design techniques; requirements generation, specification, and validation.

Integration of Formal Methods: Integration of formal methods and software engineering; integration of diverse formal methods techniques; integration of formal methods with simulation, analysis, and test approaches; integration of learning-based techniques with formal methods; use of AI models (e.g., LLMs) in formal methods pipelines, and other neuro-symbolic methods.

Formal Methods in Practice: Experience reports on applications of formal methods in industry; use of formal methods in education; applications of formal methods to concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems, human-machine systems, autonomous systems, cyber-physical systems, fault-detection, diagnostics, and prognostics systems; formal reasoning about real-time systems, scheduling, and planning; and formal reasoning about artifacts generated by AI-based language models (such as LLMs, vision-language-action models, etc.).