Software, Services, and Systems

Book Preface

This volume contains the 38 papers written by close collaborators and friends of Martin Wirsing on the occasion of the celebration of his retirement from the chair of Programming and Software Engineering at the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universit¨at in Munich.

The volume is a reflection, with gratitude and admiration, on Martin’s highly creative, remarkably fruitful, and intellectually generous life, which is thriving as strongly as ever. It is also a snapshot of research ideas that in many cases have been deeply influenced by Martin’s work. In a sense, it is also a vantage point from which to foresee further developments to come: by Martin himself, and by many other people encouraged and stimulated by his friendship and example.

The book consists of six sections. The first section contains personal remembrance and expression of gratitude from Martin’s friends. The remaining five sections comprise groups of papers corresponding to specific scientific interests of Martin and are ordered according to his scientific evolution:

– Logical and Algebraic Foundations

– Algebraic Specifications, Institutions, and Rewriting

– Foundations of Software Engineering

– Service-Oriented Systems

– Adaptive and Autonomic Systems

As book editors, we were helped by several reviewers, who gave comments on the submitted papers and suggestions for their improvement. We would like to thank all of them for their very professional and reliable help. In fact, each paper was reviewed by at least two colleagues and for a few papers we had a couple of rounds of interactions with authors and reviewers before we were sure that the standard of the published work was in line with what Martin deserves.

This volume was presented to Martin on March 6, 2015, during a twoday symposium held at the Institut f¨ur Informatik of Ludwig-Maximilians- Universit¨at in Munich. During the symposium all papers were presented by one of the authors and we also had three invited talks from eminent scientists, whose friendship with Martin dates back many years. We thank Manfred Broy, Jos´e Meseguer, and Ugo Montanari for having accepted our invitation.

We would also like to thank the Programming and Software Technology group at the Institut f¨ur Informatik of LMU for the support in the organization of the symposium, and EU project ASCENS and LMU Munich for the financial and logistic support. We are grateful to Alfred Hofmann and to the Springer LNCS team for their support during the publication phase of this Festschrift and we take the occasion to acknowledge the excellent support provided by the conference management system EasyChair.