Introduction to special section on formal methods in pervasive computing

Ubiquitous and pervasive applications may present critical requirements from the point of view of functional correctness, reliability, availability, security, and safety. Unlike traditional safety-critical applications, the behavior of ubiquitous and pervasive applications is affected by the movements and location of users and resources. In this article, we first present emerging formal methods for the description of both entities and their behavior in pervasive computing environments; then, we introduce this special issue. Despite many previous works that have focused on modeling the entities, relatively few have concentrated on modeling or verifying behaviors; and almost none has dealt with combining techniques proposed in these two aspects. The articles accepted in this special issue cover some of the topics aforementioned and constitute a representative sample of the latest development of formal methods in pervasive computing environments.