Concurrency Controls in Event-Driven Programs

Functional reactive programming (FRP) is a programming paradigm that utilizes the concepts of functional programming and time-varying data types to create event-driven applications. In this paradigm, data types in which values can change over time are primitives and can be applied to functions. These values are composable and can be combined with functions to create values that react to changes in values from multiple sources. Events can be modeled as values that change in discrete time steps. Computation can be encoded as values that produce events, with combination operators, it enables us to write concurrent event-driven programs by combining the concurrent computation as events. Combined with the denotational approach of functional programming, we can write programs in a concise manner. The style of event-driven programming has been widely adopted for developing graphical user interface applications, since they need to process events concurrently to stay responsive. This makes FRP a fitting approach for managing complex state and handling of events concurrently. In recent years, real-time systems such as IoT (internet of things) applications have become an important field of computation. Applying FRP to real-time systems is still an active area of research.For IoT applications, they are commonly tasked to perform data capturing in real time and transmit them to other devices. They need to exchange data with other applications over the internet and respond in a timely manner. The data needs to be processed, for simple analysis or more computation intensive work such as machine learning. Designing applications that perform these tasks and remain efficient and responsive can be challenging. In this thesis, we demonstrate that FRP is a suitable approach for real-time applications. These applications require soft real-time requirements, where systems can tolerate tasks that fail to meet the deadline and the results of these tasks might still be useful.First, we design the concurrency abstractions needed for supporting asynchronous computation and use it as the basis for building the FRP abstraction. Our implementation is in Haskell, a functional programming language with a rich type system that allows us to model abstractions with ease. The concurrency abstraction is based on some of the ideas from the Haskell solution for asynchronous computation, which elegantly supports cancelation in a composable way. Based on the Haskell implementation, we extend our design with operators that are more suitable for building web applications. We translate our implementation to JavaScript as it is more commonly used for web application development, and implementing the RxJS interface. RxJS is a popular JavaScript library for reactive programming in web applications. By implementing the RxJS interface, we argue that our programming model implemented in Haskell is also applicable in mainstream languages such as JavaScript

Advanced Concepts in Asynchronous Exception Handling

Asynchronous exception handling is a useful and sometimes necessary alternative form of communication among threads. This thesis examines and classifies general concepts related to asynchrony, asynchronous propagation control, and how asynchronous exception handling affects control flow. The work covers four advanced topics affecting asynchronous exception-handling in a multi-threaded environment. The first topic is concerned with the non-determinism that asynchronous exceptions introduce into a program's control-flow because exceptions can be propagated at virtually any point during execution. The concept of asynchronous propagation control, which restricts the set of exceptions that can be propagated, is examined in depth. Combining it with a restriction of asynchrony that permits propagation of asynchronous exceptions only at certain well-defined (poll) points can re-establish sufficient determinism to verify a program's correctness, but introduces overhead, as well as a delay between the delivery of an asynchronous exception and its propagation. It also disturbs a programmer's intuition about asynchronous propagation in the program, and requires the use of programming idioms to avoid errors. The second topic demonstrates how a combined model of full and restricted asynchrony can be safely employed, and thus, allow for a more intuitive use of asynchronous propagation control, as well as potentially improve performance. The third topic focuses on the delay of propagation that is introduced when a thread is blocked, i.e., on concurrency constructs that provide mutual exclusion or synchronization. An approach is presented to transparently unblock threads so propagation of asynchronous termination and resumption exceptions can begin immediately. The approach does not require additional syntax, simplifies certain programming situations, and can improve performance. The fourth topic explores usability issues affecting the understanding of (asynchronous) exception handling as a language feature. To overcome these issues, tools and language features are presented that help in understanding exception handling code by providing additional run-time information, as well as assist in testing. For all topics, the necessary extensions to the syntax/semantics of the language are discussed; where applicable, a prototypical implementation is presented, with examples that demonstrate the benefits of the new approaches

Compiling SHIM

Embedded systems demand concurrency for supporting simultaneous actions in their environment and parallel hardware. Although most concurrent programming formalisms are prone to races and non-determinism, some, such as our SHIM (software/hardware integration medium) language, avoid them by design. In particular, the behavior of SHIM programs is scheduling-independent, meaning the I/O behavior of a program is independent of scheduling policies, including the relative execution rates of concurrent processes. The SHIM project demonstrates how a scheduling-independent language simplifies the design, optimization, and verification of concurrent systems. Through examples and discussion, we describe the SHIM language and code generation techniques for both shared-memory and message-passing architectures, along with some verification algorithms

A Mobile Satellite Experiment (MSAT-X) network definition

The network architecture development of the Mobile Satellite Experiment (MSAT-X) project for the past few years is described. The results and findings of the network research activities carried out under the MSAT-X project are summarized. A framework is presented upon which the Mobile Satellite Systems (MSSs) operator can design a commercial network. A sample network configuration and its capability are also included under the projected scenario. The Communication Interconnection aspect of the MSAT-X network is discussed. In the MSAT-X network structure two basic protocols are presented: the channel access protocol, and the link connection protocol. The error-control techniques used in the MSAT-X project and the packet structure are also discussed. A description of two testbeds developed for experimentally simulating the channel access protocol and link control protocol, respectively, is presented. A sample network configuration and some future network activities of the MSAT-X project are also presented

A Multiagent Platform for Developments of Accounting Intelligent Applications

AOP – Agent Oriented Programming – is a new software paradigm that brings many concepts from the artificial intelligence. This paper provides a short overview of the JADE software platform and the principal’s components constituting its distributed architecture. Furthermore, it describes how to launch the platform with the command–line options and how to experiment with the main graphical tools of this platform.JADE, multiagent system, container, message, communication,accounting.

Programming Shared Memory Multiprocessors with Deterministic Message-Passing Concurrency: Compiling SHIM to Pthreads

Multicore shared-memory architectures are becoming prevalent and bring many programming challenges. Among the biggest are data races: accesses to shared resources that make a program's behavior depend on scheduling decisions beyond its control. To eliminate such races, the SHIM concurrent programming language adopts deterministic message passing as it sole communication mechanism. We demonstrate such language restrictions are practical by presenting a SHIM to C-plus-Pthreads compiler that can produce efficient code for shared-memory multiprocessors. We present a parallel JPEG decoder and FFT exhibiting 3.05 and 3.3times speedups on a four-core processor

Evolution of Reactive Streams API for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

This article describes the role of reactive streams concept as a core communication pattern in mobile-first applications and proposes directions for evolution of its classic API to better match mobile application requirements. By designing the selected examples of mobile applications, the authors evaluate the Reactive Streams API which is an increasingly accepted standard for asynchronous communication with back-pressure. This design is then assessed with regard to solution expressiveness and the ability to satisfy functional and non-functional requirements of the stated problems. It is observed that the used API does not allow for a context propagation from a mobile subscriber to a publisher so that the streamed data can be well adjusted to the variable reception context of a given mobile device. To address this issues, a context-aware variant of this API is proposed and it is demonstrated and discussed by presenting an alternative application design

Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin

Decentralised Coordination in RoboCup Rescue

Emergency responders are faced with a number of significant challenges when managing major disasters. First, the number of rescue tasks posed is usually larger than the number of responders (or agents) and the resources available to them. Second, each task is likely to require a different level of effort in order to be completed by its deadline. Third, new tasks may continually appear or disappear from the environment, thus requiring the responders to quickly recompute their allocation of resources. Fourth, forming teams or coalitions of multiple agents from different agencies is vital since no single agency will have all the resources needed to save victims, unblock roads, and extinguish the ?res which might erupt in the disaster space. Given this, coalitions have to be efficiently selected and scheduled to work across the disaster space so as to maximise the number of lives and the portion of the infrastructure saved. In particular, it is important that the selection of such coalitions should be performed in a decentralised fashion in order to avoid a single point of failure in the system. Moreover, it is critical that responders communicate only locally given they are likely to have limited battery power or minimal access to long range communication devices. Against this background, we provide a novel decentralised solution to the coalition formation process that pervades disaster management. More specifically, we model the emergency management scenario defined in the RoboCup Rescue disaster simulation platform as a Coalition Formation with Spatial and Temporal constraints (CFST) problem where agents form coalitions in order to complete tasks, each with different demands. In order to design a decentralised algorithm for CFST we formulate it as a Distributed Constraint Optimisation problem and show how to solve it using the state-of-the-art Max-Sum algorithm that provides a completely decentralised message-passing solution. We then provide a novel algorithm (F-Max-Sum) that avoids sending redundant messages and efficiently adapts to changes in the environment. In empirical evaluations, our algorithm is shown to generate better solutions than other decentralised algorithms used for this problem