The SDL Forum is held every 2 years and is one of the most important open events in the calendar for anyone from academia or industry involved in System Design Languages and modelling technologies. It is a primary conference event for discussion of the evolution and use of these languages. The most recent innovations, trends, experiences and concerns in the field are discussed and presented. Modelling, specification, and analysis of distributed systems, embedded systems, communication systems, and real-time systems are addressed. The 14th SDL Forum will be held during the fourth week of September 2009 by Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany, in collaboration with IBM Rational.

The SDL Forum Society that runs the Forum is a non-profit organization established by language users and tool providers to promote the Specification and Description Language (SDL), Message Sequence Charts (MSC) and related System Design Languages (including but not limited to UML, ASN.1, TTCN, SysML and URN), to provide and disseminate information on the development and use of the languages, to support education on the languages and to plan and organize the "SDL Forum" series and events to promote the languages.

The last few years have seen multi-core processors become common technology for consumer computers. Systems with more than one processor have existed for some time, but one issue is engineering software that exploits the processing power available. Many programming language support systems assume a single processor, or distribution of processes over processors is handled by the operating system. System Design Languages such as the Unified Modeling Language or ITU-T Specification and Description Language allow the distribution issue, and deferring whether the processes or agents in systems are loosely (or tightly) coupled until later in product engineering. These issues still need to be tackled, and therefore a focus of the SDL2009 is multi-processor and multi-core issues. Papers on these topics are particularly welcome.

The SDL Forum addresses issues related to the modelling and analysis of reactive systems, distributed systems and real-time and complex systems such as telecommunications, automotive, and aerospace applications. The conference programme will include:

The intended audience includes users of modelling techniques in industrial, research and standardization contexts, as well as tool vendors and language researchers.

The SDL Forum Society is accredited by ITU-T as an organization contributing to the System Design Language standards, and the timing of the 14th SDL Forum has been chosen to be an opportunity to forward issues to related ITU-T meetings scheduled the preceding and the same week.

The aim of the forum is to anticipate and influence the future trends and to focus on issues that are important to its expected delegates. Authors are therefore invited to submit papers on topics related to System Design Languages including the following non-exclusive list of topics:

Important: Electronic submission in pdf-format, using EDAS http://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=7345, is mandatory. Please refer to the workshop homepage for more information. Papers accepted or under review for another event are ineligible for submission to SDL2009. All submissions must be in English.

The SDL Forum Program Committee will evaluate the technical contribution of each submission as well as its accessibility to the audience. Papers will be judged on significance, originality, substance, correctness, and clarity. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers have to adhere to the LNCS_format. LaTeX2e is recommended, preferably even at the initial submission stage to avoid later conversions.

Accepted papers must be presented at SDL2009 by one of the authors. As in previous editions, the SDL2009 proceedings will be published in the Springer LNCS series.