18 research outputs found
Characterizing Behavioural Congruences for Petri Nets
We exploit a notion of interface for Petri nets in order to design a set of net combinators. For such a calculus of nets, we focus on the behavioural congruences arising from four simple notions of behaviour, viz., traces, maximal traces, step, and maximal step traces, and from the corresponding four notions of bisimulation, viz., weak and weak step bisimulation and their maximal versions. We characterize such congruences via universal contexts and via games, providing in such a way an understanding of their discerning powers
Practical Model Reductions for Verification of Multi-Agent Systems
Formal verification of intelligent agents is often computationally infeasible
due to state-space explosion. We present a tool for reducing the impact of the
explosion by means of state abstraction that is (a) easy to use and understand
by non-experts, and (b) agent-based in the sense that it operates on a modular
representation of the system, rather than on its huge explicit state model
Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency
This paper retraces, collects, and summarises contributions of the authors --- in collaboration with others --- on the theme of Petri nets and their categorical relationships to other models of concurrency
Verification of Multi-Agent Properties in Electronic Voting: A Case Study
Formal verification of multi-agent systems is hard, both theoretically and in
practice. In particular, studies that use a single verification technique
typically show limited efficiency, and allow to verify only toy examples. Here,
we propose some new techniques and combine them with several recently developed
ones to see what progress can be achieved for a real-life scenario. Namely, we
use fixpoint approximation, domination-based strategy search, partial order
reduction, and parallelization to verify heterogeneous scalable models of the
Selene e-voting protocol. The experimental results show that the combination
allows to verify requirements for much more sophisticated models than
previously
Strategic Abilities of Asynchronous Agents: Semantic Side Effects and How to Tame Them
Recently, we have proposed a framework for verification of agents' abilities
in asynchronous multi-agent systems, together with an algorithm for automated
reduction of models. The semantics was built on the modeling tradition of
distributed systems. As we show here, this can sometimes lead to
counterintuitive interpretation of formulas when reasoning about the outcome of
strategies. First, the semantics disregards finite paths, and thus yields
unnatural evaluation of strategies with deadlocks. Secondly, the semantic
representations do not allow to capture the asymmetry between proactive agents
and the recipients of their choices. We propose how to avoid the problems by a
suitable extension of the representations and change of the execution semantics
for asynchronous MAS. We also prove that the model reduction scheme still works
in the modified framework
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FLAVERS: a Finite State Verification Technique for Software Systems
Software systems are increasing in size and complexity and, subsequently, are becoming ever more difficult to validate. Finite State Verification (FSV) has been gaining credibility and attention as an alternative to testing and to formal verification approaches based on theorem proving. There has recently been a great deal of excitement about the potential for FSV approaches to prove properties about hardware descriptions but, for the most part, these approaches do not scale adequately to handle the complexity usually found in software. In this paper, we describe an FSV approach that creates a compact and conservative, but imprecise, model of the system being analyzed, and then assists the analyst in adding additional details as guided by previous analysis results. This paper describes this approach and a prototype implementation, called FLAVERS, presents a detailed example, and then provides some experimental results demonstrating scalability
Fluctuation-driven computing on number-conserving cellular automata
A number-conserving cellular automaton (NCCA) is a cellular automaton in which the states of cells are denoted by integers, and the sum of all of the numbers in a configuration is conserved throughout its evolution. NCCAs have been widely used to model physical systems that are ruled by conservation laws of mass or energy. lmai et al. [13] showed that the local transition function of NCCA can be effectively translated into the sum of a binary flow function over pairs of neighboring cells. In this paper, we explore the computability of NCCAs in which the pairwise number flows are performed at fully asynchronous timings. Despite the randomness that is associated with asynchronous transitions, useful computation still can be accomplished efficiently in the cellular automata through the active exploitation of fluctuations [18]. Specifically, certain numbers may flow randomly fluctuating between forward and backward directions in the cellular space, as if they were subject to Brownian motion. Because random fluctuations promise a powerful resource for searching through a computational state space, the Brownian-like flow of the numbers allows for efficient embedding of logic circuits into our novel asynchronous NCCA
Second-Order Finite Automata
Traditionally, finite automata theory has been used as a framework for the representation of possibly infinite sets of strings. In this work, we introduce the notion of second-order finite automata, a formalism that combines finite automata with ordered decision diagrams, with the aim of representing possibly infinite sets of sets of strings. Our main result states that second-order finite automata can be canonized with respect to the second-order languages they represent. Using this canonization result, we show that sets of sets of strings represented by second-order finite automata are closed under the usual Boolean operations, such as union, intersection, difference and even under a suitable notion of complementation. Additionally, emptiness of intersection and inclusion are decidable. We provide two algorithmic applications for second-order automata. First, we show that several width/size minimization problems for deterministic and nondeterministic ODDs are solvable in fixed-parameter tractable time when parameterized by the width of the input ODD. In particular, our results imply FPT algorithms for corresponding width/size minimization problems for ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) with a fixed variable ordering. Previously, only algorithms that take exponential time in the size of the input OBDD were known for width minimization, even for OBDDs of constant width. Second, we show that for each k and w one can count the number of distinct functions computable by ODDs of width at most w and length k in time h(|Σ|,w) ⋅ kO(1), for a suitable . This improves exponentially on the time necessary to explicitly enumerate all such functions, which is exponential in both the width parameter w and in the length k of the ODDs.publishedVersio