SASB is a one day workshop that aims at promoting discussions and collaborations at the intersection inbetween the specific field of formal methods covering modelling languages and static analysis, and the following fields: (i) systems biology targetting a system-level understanding of biological systems, (ii) synthetic biology targetting functional modifications to naturally occurring systems, (iii) molecular programming and development of engineered biological and chemical systems.

The workshop targets biological networks and executable models of biological systems and molecular devices, focusing on their formal specification and static analysis. A special emphasis is given to rule-based or process-algebraic languages that have the advantage of compact representation and provide a robust tool for systems and synthetic biology as well as a good base for molecular programming languages.

Since the state space explodes combinatorially with number of possible states of biochemical substances, static analysis allows investigation of important features from a model without its exhaustive execution. In particular, it allows to pre-process molecular programs and optimise their implementation in DNA; ease characterization of the behaviors of a model; abstractions that prevent a full exploration of the potential concrete behaviors; model reductions, that decrease the dimension of a model while preserving important behaviors; characterization of dynamical properties with respect to the topology of the model; etc. All these features empower and strengthen applicability and efficiency of dynamical analysis and verification.