Challenges in Timed Languages: From Applied Theory to Basic Theory

The Concurrency Column, by Luca Aceto. Partially based on the invited talk at FORMATS'03 workshopCurrent state and perspectives of development of the theory of timed languages are analyzed. A large list of open problems is suggested

A Formal Framework For Multi-Party Business Protocols (Revision of CentER DP 2008-79)

Enterprise-class information systems based on the principles of Service Oriented Architecture comprise large numbers of long-running, highly dynamic complex end-to-end service interactions, called conversations, based on message exchanges that typically transcend several organizations and span several geographical locations. Conversations in service-based systems can be described using business protocols that are formal notations specifying the timed message exchanges among participants in a conversation from a local point of view (orchestrations) or global (choreographies). In this work we introduce a formal framework based on Deterministic Finite Automata enriched with temporal constraints to describe multi-party business protocols. We also explore the notion of multi-party business protocol soundness and show how it is possible to execute a multi-party protocol consistently in a completely distributed manner and at the same time ensure the progression of the execution (i.e. no “deadlocks”).service oriented architecture;message exchange patterns business protocols;orchestrations;choreographies;soundness

Kleene-Schützenberger and Büchi Theorems for Weighted Timed Automata

In 1994, Alur and Dill introduced timed automata as a simple mathematical model for modelling the behaviour of real-time systems. In this thesis, we extend timed automata with weights. More detailed, we equip both the states and transitions of a timed automaton with weights taken from an appropriate mathematical structure. The weight of a transition determines the weight for taking this transition, and the weight of a state determines the weight for letting time elapse in this state. Since the weight for staying in a state depends on time, this model, called weighted timed automata, has many interesting applications, for instance, in operations research and scheduling. We give characterizations for the behaviours of weighted timed automata in terms of rational expressions and logical formulas. These formalisms are useful for the specification of real-time systems with continuous resource consumption. We further investigate the relation between the behaviours of weighted timed automata and timed automata. Finally, we present important decidability results for weighted timed automata

Decomposition and Composition of Timed Automata

We propose in this paper a decomposition theorem for the timed automata introduced by Alur and Dill [3,4]. To this purpose, we define a new simple and natural composition operation, indexed by the set of clocks to be reset, on timed automata generalizing the classical untimed concatenation. Then we extend the famous Kleene's and Büchi's theorems on classical untimed automata by simply changing the basic objects to take time into account, keeping the union operation and replacing the concatenation, finite and infinite iterations by the new timed concatenations and their induced iterations. Thus, and on the contrary of the interesting result of [8], we do not need neither intersection nor renaming. Therefore, and up to our knowledge, our result provides the simplest known algebraic characterization of recognizable timed languages