Exploiting Labels in Structural Operational Semantics

Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) allows transitions to be labelled. This is fully exploited in SOS descriptions of concurrent systems, but usually not at all in conventional descriptions of sequential programming languages. This paper shows how the use of labels can provide significantly simpler and more modular descriptions of programming languages. However, the full power of labels is obtained only when the set of labels is made into a category, as in the recently-proposed MSOS variant of SOS

Exploiting the Hierarchical Structure of Rule-Based Specifications for Decision Planning

Rule-based specifications have been very successful as a declarative approach in many domains, due to the handy yet solid foundations offered by rule-based machineries like term and graph rewriting. Realistic problems, however, call for suitable techniques to guarantee scalability. For instance, many domains exhibit a hierarchical structure that can be exploited conveniently. This is particularly evident for composition associations of models. We propose an explicit representation of such structured models and a methodology that exploits it for the description and analysis of model- and rule-based systems. The approach is presented in the framework of rewriting logic and its efficient implementation in the rewrite engine Maude and is illustrated with a case study.

Regulating Data Exchange in Service Oriented Applications

We define a type system for COWS, a formalism for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Our types permit to express policies constraining data exchanges in terms of sets of service partner names attachable to each single datum. Service programmers explicitly write only the annotations necessary to specify the wanted policies for communicable data, while a type inference system (statically) derives the minimal additional annotations that ensure consistency of services initial configuration. Then, the language dynamic semantics only performs very simple checks to authorize or block communication. We prove that the type system and the operational semantics are sound. As a consequence, we have the following data protection property: services always comply with the policies regulating the exchange of data among interacting services. We illustrate our approach through a simplified but realistic scenario for a service-based electronic marketplace

Connector algebras for C/E and P/T nets interactions

A quite fourishing research thread in the recent literature on component based system is concerned with the algebraic properties of different classes of connectors. In a recent paper, an algebra of stateless connectors was presented that consists of five kinds of basic connectors, namely symmetry, synchronization, mutual exclusion, hiding and inaction, plus their duals and it was shown how they can be freely composed in series and in parallel to model sophisticated "glues". In this paper we explore the expressiveness of stateful connectors obtained by adding one-place buffers or unbounded buffers to the stateless connectors. The main results are: i) we show how different classes of connectors exactly correspond to suitable classes of Petri nets equipped with compositional interfaces, called nets with boundaries; ii) we show that the difference between strong and weak semantics in stateful connectors is reflected in the semantics of nets with boundaries by moving from the classic step semantics (strong case) to a novel banking semantics (weak case), where a step can be executed by taking some "debit" tokens to be given back during the same step; iii) we show that the corresponding bisimilarities are congruences (w.r.t. composition of connectors in series and in parallel); iv) we show that suitable monoidality laws, like those arising when representing stateful connectors in the tile model, can nicely capture concurrency aspects; and v) as a side result, we provide a basic algebra, with a finite set of symbols, out of which we can compose all P/T nets, fulfilling a long standing quest

Evaluating the performance of model transformation styles in Maude

Rule-based programming has been shown to be very successful in many application areas. Two prominent examples are the specification of model transformations in model driven development approaches and the definition of structured operational semantics of formal languages. General rewriting frameworks such as Maude are flexible enough to allow the programmer to adopt and mix various rule styles. The choice between styles can be biased by the programmer’s background. For instance, experts in visual formalisms might prefer graph-rewriting styles, while experts in semantics might prefer structurally inductive rules. This paper evaluates the performance of different rule styles on a significant benchmark taken from the literature on model transformation. Depending on the actual transformation being carried out, our results show that different rule styles can offer drastically different performances. We point out the situations from which each rule style benefits to offer a valuable set of hints for choosing one style over the other

A Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore, many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent, reactive, and distributed systems. In this paper, we follow this approach and introduce CWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We show that CWS can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We illustrate the specification style that CWS supports by means of a large case study from the automotive domain and a number of more specific examples drawn from it

Type systems for distributed programs: session communication

Distributed systems are everywhere around us and guaranteeing their correctness is of paramount importance. It is natural to expect that these systems interact and communicate among them to achieve a common task. In this work, we develop techniques based on types and type systems for the verification of correctness, consistency and safety properties related to communication in complex distributed systems. We study advanced safety properties related to communication, like deadlock or lock freedom and progress. We study session types in the pi-calculus describing distributed systems and communication-centric computation. Most importantly, we de- fine an encoding of the session pi-calculus into the standard typed pi-calculus in order to understand the expressive power of these concurrent calculi. We show how to derive in the session pi-calculus basic properties, like type safety or complex ones, like progress, by exploiting this encoding

Formal Component-Based Semantics

One of the proposed solutions for improving the scalability of semantics of programming languages is Component-Based Semantics, introduced by Peter D. Mosses. It is expected that this framework can also be used effectively for modular meta theoretic reasoning. This paper presents a formalization of Component-Based Semantics in the theorem prover Coq. It is based on Modular SOS, a variant of SOS, and makes essential use of dependent types, while profiting from type classes. This formalization constitutes a contribution towards modular meta theoretic formalizations in theorem provers. As a small example, a modular proof of determinism of a mini-language is developed.Comment: In Proceedings SOS 2011, arXiv:1108.279

Meta SOS - A Maude Based SOS Meta-Theory Framework

Meta SOS is a software framework designed to integrate the results from the meta-theory of structural operational semantics (SOS). These results include deriving semantic properties of language constructs just by syntactically analyzing their rule-based definition, as well as automatically deriving sound and ground-complete axiomatizations for languages, when considering a notion of behavioural equivalence. This paper describes the Meta SOS framework by blending aspects from the meta-theory of SOS, details on their implementation in Maude, and running examples.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2013, arXiv:1307.690