Towards a Theory of Glue

We propose and study the notions of behaviour type and composition operator making a first step towards the definition of a formal framework for studying behaviour composition in a setting sufficiently general to provide insight into how the component-based systems should be modelled and compared. We illustrate the proposed notions on classical examples (Traces, Labelled Transition Systems and Coalgebras). Finally, the definition of memoryless glue operators, takes us one step closer to a formal understanding of the separation of concerns principle stipulating that computational aspects of a system should be localised within its atomic components, whereas coordination layer responsible for managing concurrency should be realised by memoryless glue operators.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2012, arXiv:1212.345

Interface Simulation Distances

The classical (boolean) notion of refinement for behavioral interfaces of system components is the alternating refinement preorder. In this paper, we define a distance for interfaces, called interface simulation distance. It makes the alternating refinement preorder quantitative by, intuitively, tolerating errors (while counting them) in the alternating simulation game. We show that the interface simulation distance satisfies the triangle inequality, that the distance between two interfaces does not increase under parallel composition with a third interface, and that the distance between two interfaces can be bounded from above and below by distances between abstractions of the two interfaces. We illustrate the framework, and the properties of the distances under composition of interfaces, with two case studies.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202

Expressiveness and Completeness in Abstraction

We study two notions of expressiveness, which have appeared in abstraction theory for model checking, and find them incomparable in general. In particular, we show that according to the most widely used notion, the class of Kripke Modal Transition Systems is strictly less expressive than the class of Generalised Kripke Modal Transition Systems (a generalised variant of Kripke Modal Transition Systems equipped with hypertransitions). Furthermore, we investigate the ability of an abstraction framework to prove a formula with a finite abstract model, a property known as completeness. We address the issue of completeness from a general perspective: the way it depends on certain abstraction parameters, as well as its relationship with expressiveness.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2012, arXiv:1208.244

Simulation and Bisimulation over Multiple Time Scales in a Behavioral Setting

This paper introduces a new behavioral system model with distinct external and internal signals possibly evolving on different time scales. This allows to capture abstraction processes or signal aggregation in the context of control and verification of large scale systems. For this new system model different notions of simulation and bisimulation are derived, ensuring that they are, respectively, preorders and equivalence relations for the system class under consideration. These relations can capture a wide selection of similarity notions available in the literature. This paper therefore provides a suitable framework for their comparisonComment: Submitted to 22nd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automatio