75,191 research outputs found
Exploring finite models in the Description Logic ELgfp
In a previous ICFCA paper we have shown that, in the Description Logics EL and ELgfp, the set of general concept inclusions holding in a finite model always has a finite basis. In this paper, we address the problem of how to compute this basis efficiently, by adapting methods from formal concept analysis
Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications
Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for
the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research
experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts
today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited
abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes,
thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led
to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at
formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism
are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of
clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN)
paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right
kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence
in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and
synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a
self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in
formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Effective Physical Processes and Active Information in Quantum Computing
The recent debate on hypercomputation has arisen new questions both on the
computational abilities of quantum systems and the Church-Turing Thesis role in
Physics. We propose here the idea of "effective physical process" as the
essentially physical notion of computation. By using the Bohm and Hiley active
information concept we analyze the differences between the standard form
(quantum gates) and the non-standard one (adiabatic and morphogenetic) of
Quantum Computing, and we point out how its Super-Turing potentialities derive
from an incomputable information source in accordance with Bell's constraints.
On condition that we give up the formal concept of "universality", the
possibility to realize quantum oracles is reachable. In this way computation is
led back to the logic of physical world.Comment: 10 pages; Added references for sections 2 and
Practical Reasoning for Very Expressive Description Logics
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms
mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from
atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications,
but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides
satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles and
functional restrictions with respect to general concept inclusion axioms and
role hierarchies; early experiments indicate that this algorithm is well-suited
for implementation. Additionally, we show that ALC extended with just
transitive and inverse roles is still in PSPACE. We investigate the limits of
decidability for this family of DLs, showing that relaxing the constraints
placed on the kinds of roles used in number restrictions leads to the
undecidability of all inference problems. Finally, we describe a number of
optimisation techniques that are crucial in obtaining implementations of the
decision procedures, which, despite the worst-case complexity of the problem,
exhibit good performance with real-life problems
Efficient First-Order Temporal Logic for Infinite-State Systems
In this paper we consider the specification and verification of
infinite-state systems using temporal logic. In particular, we describe
parameterised systems using a new variety of first-order temporal logic that is
both powerful enough for this form of specification and tractable enough for
practical deductive verification. Importantly, the power of the temporal
language allows us to describe (and verify) asynchronous systems, communication
delays and more complex properties such as liveness and fairness properties.
These aspects appear difficult for many other approaches to infinite-state
verification.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure
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