Advances in Program Analysis and Verification for Reliable Software Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex and widely deployed in safety-critical, security-sensitive, and mission-critical applications. Ensuring software reliability, security, and correctness has become a fundamental challenge due to the increasing complexity of software architectures, diverse execution environments, and sophisticated system behaviors. Program analysis and verification techniques provide effective approaches for understanding software behaviors, identifying potential defects, and ensuring system dependability throughout the software lifecycle.

Recent advances in static analysis, dynamic analysis, formal verification, automated testing, and intelligent program analysis have significantly improved the capability of detecting software vulnerabilities, verifying program properties, and enhancing software quality. Meanwhile, emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and large language models, have introduced new opportunities for automated code understanding, vulnerability discovery, program repair, and verification.

This Special Issue aims to collect recent advances and innovative approaches in program analysis and verification. We invite original research articles and review papers addressing, but not limited to, static and dynamic program analysis, formal methods, software testing and fuzzing, vulnerability detection, automated program repair, intelligent software engineering, code representation and understanding, security verification, and reliability assurance for complex software systems. The goal of this Special Issue is to promote the development of advanced techniques and practical solutions for building secure, reliable, and trustworthy software systems.

Dr. Jiaju Bai
Guest Editor

Dr. Zuming Jiang
Guest Editor Assistant

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.