20,442 research outputs found
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
Automatic checking of the usage of the C++ move semantics
The C++ programming language is a favorable choice when implementing high performance applications, like real-time and embedded programming, large telecommunication systems, financial simulations, as well as a wide range of other speed sensitive programs. While C++ has all the facilities to handle the computer hardware without compromises, the copy based value semantics of assignment is a common source of performance degradation. New language features, like the move semantics were introduced recently to serve an instrument to avoid unnecessary copies. Unfortunately, correct usage of move semantics is not trivial, and unintentional expensive copies of C++ objects - like copying containers instead of using move semantics - may determine the main (worst-case) time characteristics of the programs. In this paper we introduce a new approach of investigating performance bottlenecks for C++ programs, which operates at language source level and targets the move semantics of the C++ programming language. We detect copies occurring in operations marked as move operations, i.e. intended not containing expensive copy actions. Move operations are marked with generalized attributes - a new language feature introduced to C++11 standard. We implemented a tool prototype to detect such copy/move semantic errors in C++ programs. Our prototype is using the open source LLVM/Clang parser infrastructure, therefore highly portable
A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection
Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache
Verifying Real-Time Systems using Explicit-time Description Methods
Timed model checking has been extensively researched in recent years. Many
new formalisms with time extensions and tools based on them have been
presented. On the other hand, Explicit-Time Description Methods aim to verify
real-time systems with general untimed model checkers. Lamport presented an
explicit-time description method using a clock-ticking process (Tick) to
simulate the passage of time together with a group of global variables for time
requirements. This paper proposes a new explicit-time description method with
no reliance on global variables. Instead, it uses rendezvous synchronization
steps between the Tick process and each system process to simulate time. This
new method achieves better modularity and facilitates usage of more complex
timing constraints. The two explicit-time description methods are implemented
in DIVINE, a well-known distributed-memory model checker. Preliminary
experiment results show that our new method, with better modularity, is
comparable to Lamport's method with respect to time and memory efficiency
Really Natural Linear Indexed Type Checking
Recent works have shown the power of linear indexed type systems for
enforcing complex program properties. These systems combine linear types with a
language of type-level indices, allowing more fine-grained analyses. Such
systems have been fruitfully applied in diverse domains, including implicit
complexity and differential privacy. A natural way to enhance the
expressiveness of this approach is by allowing the indices to depend on runtime
information, in the spirit of dependent types. This approach is used in DFuzz,
a language for differential privacy. The DFuzz type system relies on an index
language supporting real and natural number arithmetic over constants and
variables. Moreover, DFuzz uses a subtyping mechanism to make types more
flexible. By themselves, linearity, dependency, and subtyping each require
delicate handling when performing type checking or type inference; their
combination increases this challenge substantially, as the features can
interact in non-trivial ways. In this paper, we study the type-checking problem
for DFuzz. We show how we can reduce type checking for (a simple extension of)
DFuzz to constraint solving over a first-order theory of naturals and real
numbers which, although undecidable, can often be handled in practice by
standard numeric solvers
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