Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Towards an Extensible Architecture and Tool Support for Model-based Verification.

Model-based software engineering (MBSE) brings models to the center of software and system design. Models are powerful abstractions used to support all phases of the software development life cycle of complex software. As these models grow larger and their complexity increases, they need to be verified and validated to preserve their correctness. One possible way to do so is by means of the use of formal methods. However, the availability of MBSE tools with support for validation and verification is limited, and they usually require the cumbersome deployment of software burdened by dependencies, preventing the adoption of these tools. This paper presents a web-based architecture designed to support the definition of domain models and provide translation capabilities to different verification formalisms. As a proof of concept for our architecture, we have developed a tool prototype that is light-weight, runs in the browser and supports: (i) definition of domain models represented as class diagrams and (ii) partial translation of class diagrams into the Alloy specification language, enabling verification of structural domain properties. We show how we have used this tool to verify properties for the public bus management system in the city of Málaga, Spain.This work was partially funded by Universidad de Málaga (Campus Internacional de Excelencia), and the Spanish Government under projects PID2021-125527NB-I00 and TED2021-130523B-I00. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions

Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life, requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441 real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and two real robots