The component-based software development approach has emerged as a promising paradigm to cope with the complexity of present-day software systems by bringing sound engineering principles into software engineering. However, many challenging conceptual and technological issues still remain in component-/service-based software development theory and practice. Moreover, the advent of cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and of the Internet of things has brought to the fore new dimensions, such as quality of service, reconfiguration and robustness to withstand inevitable faults, which require established concepts to be revisited and new ones to be developed in order to meet the opportunities offered by those architectures.

FACS 2016 is concerned with how formal methods can be used to make component-based and service-oriented software development succeed. Formal methods have provided a foundation for component-based software by successfully addressing challenging issues such as mathematical models for components, composition and adaptation, or rigorous approaches to verification, deployment, testing, and certification.