72,944 research outputs found
Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance
Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft
or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner.
Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''.
The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few.
This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage.
The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling
Anonymity and Information Hiding in Multiagent Systems
We provide a framework for reasoning about information-hiding requirements in
multiagent systems and for reasoning about anonymity in particular. Our
framework employs the modal logic of knowledge within the context of the runs
and systems framework, much in the spirit of our earlier work on secrecy
[Halpern and O'Neill 2002]. We give several definitions of anonymity with
respect to agents, actions, and observers in multiagent systems, and we relate
our definitions of anonymity to other definitions of information hiding, such
as secrecy. We also give probabilistic definitions of anonymity that are able
to quantify an observer s uncertainty about the state of the system. Finally,
we relate our definitions of anonymity to other formalizations of anonymity and
information hiding, including definitions of anonymity in the process algebra
CSP and definitions of information hiding using function views.Comment: Replacement. 36 pages. Full version of CSFW '03 paper, submitted to
JCS. Made substantial changes to Section 6; added references throughou
Leader Election in Anonymous Rings: Franklin Goes Probabilistic
We present a probabilistic leader election algorithm for anonymous, bidirectional, asynchronous rings. It is based on an algorithm from Franklin, augmented with random identity selection, hop counters to detect identity clashes, and round numbers modulo 2. As a result, the algorithm is finite-state, so that various model checking techniques can be employed to verify its correctness, that is, eventually a unique leader is elected with probability one. We also sketch a formal correctness proof of the algorithm for rings with arbitrary size
Programming Telepathy: Implementing Quantum Non-Locality Games
Quantum pseudo-telepathy is an intriguing phenomenon which results from the
application of quantum information theory to communication complexity. To
demonstrate this phenomenon researchers in the field of quantum communication
complexity devised a number of quantum non-locality games. The setting of these
games is as follows: the players are separated so that no communication between
them is possible and are given a certain computational task. When the players
have access to a quantum resource called entanglement, they can accomplish the
task: something that is impossible in a classical setting. To an observer who
is unfamiliar with the laws of quantum mechanics it seems that the players
employ some sort of telepathy; that is, they somehow exchange information
without sharing a communication channel. This paper provides a formal framework
for specifying, implementing, and analysing quantum non-locality games
Modelling and analyzing adaptive self-assembling strategies with Maude
Building adaptive systems with predictable emergent behavior is a challenging task and it is becoming a critical need. The research community has accepted the challenge by introducing approaches of various nature: from software architectures, to programming paradigms, to analysis techniques. We recently proposed a conceptual framework for adaptation centered around the role of control data. In this paper we show that it can be naturally realized in a reflective logical language like Maude by using the Reflective Russian Dolls model. Moreover, we exploit this model to specify, validate and analyse a prominent example of adaptive system: robot swarms equipped with self-assembly strategies. The analysis exploits the statistical model checker PVeStA
Quantitative Analysis for Authentication of Low-cost RFID Tags
Formal analysis techniques are widely used today in order to verify and
analyze communication protocols. In this work, we launch a quantitative
verification analysis for the low- cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
protocol proposed by Song and Mitchell. The analysis exploits a Discrete-Time
Markov Chain (DTMC) using the well-known PRISM model checker. We have managed
to represent up to 100 RFID tags communicating with a reader and quantify each
RFID session according to the protocol's computation and transmission cost
requirements. As a consequence, not only does the proposed analysis provide
quantitative verification results, but also it constitutes a methodology for
RFID designers who want to validate their products under specific cost
requirements.Comment: To appear in the 36th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN
2011
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