On Model Checking Boolean BI

The logic of bunched implications (BI), introduced by O'Hearn and Pym, is a substructural logic which freely combines additive and multiplicative implications. Boolean BI (BBI) denotes BI with classical interpretation of additives and its model is the commutative monoid. We show that when the monoid is finitely generated and propositions are recursively defined, or the monoid is infinitely generated and propositions are restricted to generator propositions, the model checking problem is undecidable. In the case of finitely related monoid and,generator propositions. the model checking problem is EXPSPACE-complete.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000270711900021&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Computer Science, Theory & MethodsEICPCI-S(ISTP)

Elimination of spatial connectives in static spatial logics

AbstractThe recent interest for specification on resources yields so-called spatial logics, that is specification languages offering new forms of reasoning: the local reasoning through the separation of the resource space into two disjoint subspaces, and the contextual reasoning through hypothetical extension of the resource space.We consider two resource models and their related logics:•The static ambient model, proposed as an abstraction of semistructured data (Proc. ESOP’01, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2028, Springer, Berlin, 2001, pp. 1–22 (invited paper)) with the static ambient logic (SAL) that was proposed as a request language, both obtained by restricting the mobile ambient calculus (Proc. FOSSACS’98, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1378, Springer, Berlin, 1998, pp. 140–155) and logic (Proc. POPL’00, ACM Press, New York, 2000, pp. 365–377) to their purely static aspects.•The memory model and the assertion language of separation logic, both defined in Reynolds (Proc. LICS’02, 2002) for the purpose of the axiomatic semantic of imperative programs manipulating pointers.We raise the questions of the expressiveness and the minimality of these logics. Our main contribution is a minimalisation technique we may apply for these two logics. We moreover show some restrictions of this technique for the extension SAL∀ with universal quantification, and we establish the minimality of the adjunct-free fragment (SALint)

Logics for Unranked Trees: An Overview

Labeled unranked trees are used as a model of XML documents, and logical languages for them have been studied actively over the past several years. Such logics have different purposes: some are better suited for extracting data, some for expressing navigational properties, and some make it easy to relate complex properties of trees to the existence of tree automata for those properties. Furthermore, logics differ significantly in their model-checking properties, their automata models, and their behavior on ordered and unordered trees. In this paper we present a survey of logics for unranked trees

Context-Aware and Secure Workflow Systems

Businesses do evolve. Their evolution necessitates the re-engineering of their existing "business processes”, with the objectives of reducing costs, delivering services on time, and enhancing their profitability in a competitive market. This is generally true and particularly in domains such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and education). The central objective of workflow technologies is to separate business policies (which normally are encoded in business logics) from the underlying business applications. Such a separation is desirable as it improves the evolution of business processes and, more often than not, facilitates the re-engineering at the organisation level without the need to detail knowledge or analyses of the application themselves. Workflow systems are currently used by many organisations with a wide range of interests and specialisations in many domains. These include, but not limited to, office automation, finance and banking sector, health-care, art, telecommunications, manufacturing and education. We take the view that a workflow is a set of "activities”, each performs a piece of functionality within a given "context” and may be constrained by some security requirements. These activities are coordinated to collectively achieve a required business objective. The specification of such coordination is presented as a set of "execution constraints” which include parallelisation (concurrency/distribution), serialisation, restriction, alternation, compensation and so on. Activities within workflows could be carried out by humans, various software based application programs, or processing entities according to the organisational rules, such as meeting deadlines or performance improvement. Workflow execution can involve a large number of different participants, services and devices which may cross the boundaries of various organisations and accessing variety of data. This raises the importance of _ context variations and context-awareness and _ security (e.g. access control and privacy). The specification of precise rules, which prevent unauthorised participants from executing sensitive tasks and also to prevent tasks from accessing unauthorised services or (commercially) sensitive information, are crucially important. For example, medical scenarios will require that: _ only authorised doctors are permitted to perform certain tasks, _ a patient medical records are not allowed to be accessed by anyone without the patient consent and _ that only specific machines are used to perform given tasks at a given time. If a workflow execution cannot guarantee these requirements, then the flow will be rejected. Furthermore, features/characteristics of security requirement are both temporal- and/or event-related. However, most of the existing models are of a static nature – for example, it is hard, if not impossible, to express security requirements which are: _ time-dependent (e.g. A customer is allowed to be overdrawn by 100 pounds only up-to the first week of every month. _ event-dependent (e.g. A bank account can only be manipulated by its owner unless there is a change in the law or after six months of his/her death). Currently, there is no commonly accepted model for secure and context-aware workflows or even a common agreement on which features a workflow security model should support. We have developed a novel approach to design, analyse and validate workflows. The approach has the following components: = A modelling/design language (known as CS-Flow). The language has the following features: – support concurrency; – context and context awareness are first-class citizens; – supports mobility as activities can move from one context to another; – has the ability to express timing constrains: delay, deadlines, priority and schedulability; – allows the expressibility of security policies (e.g. access control and privacy) without the need for extra linguistic complexities; and – enjoy sound formal semantics that allows us to animate designs and compare various designs. = An approach known as communication-closed layer is developed, that allows us to serialise a highly distributed workflow to produce a semantically equivalent quasi-sequential flow which is easier to understand and analyse. Such re-structuring, gives us a mechanism to design fault-tolerant workflows as layers are atomic activities and various existing forward and backward error recovery techniques can be deployed. = Provide a reduction semantics to CS-Flow that allows us to build a tool support to animate a specifications and designs. This has been evaluated on a Health care scenario, namely the Context Aware Ward (CAW) system. Health care provides huge amounts of business workflows, which will benefit from workflow adaptation and support through pervasive computing systems. The evaluation takes two complementary strands: – provide CS-Flow’s models and specifications and – formal verification of time-critical component of a workflow

Analysis of spatio-temporal properties of stochastic systems using TSTL

In this article, we present Three-Valued spatio-temporal Logic (TSTL), which enriches the available spatiotemporal analysis of properties expressed in Signal spatio-temporal Logic (SSTL), to give further insight into the dynamic behavior of systems. Our novel analysis starts from the estimation of satisfaction probabilities of given SSTL properties and allows the analysis of their temporal and spatial evolution. Moreover, in our verification procedure, we use a three-valued approach to include the intrinsic and unavoidable uncertainty related to the simulation-based statistical evaluation of the estimates; this can be also used to assess the appropriate number of simulations to use depending on the analysis needs. We present the syntax and three-valued semantics of TSTL and specific extended monitoring algorithms to check the validity of TSTL formulas. We introduce a reliability requirement for TSTL monitoring and an automatic procedure to verify it. Two case studies demonstrate how TSTL broadens the application of spatio-temporal logics in realistic scenarios, enabling analysis of threat monitoring and privacy preservation based on spatial stochastic population models

Web and Semantic Web Query Languages

A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query languages considered are stressed in a conclusion