Formal Specification Language for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a form of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (wireless Network), originally used to provide safety & comfort for passengers, & currently being used to establish Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) among near by Vehicles (V2V Communications) and between vehicles and nearby fixed infrastructure equipments; Roadside equipments (V2I Communications). VANET was used also to warn drivers of collision possibilities, road sign alarms, auto-payment at road tolls and parks. Usually VANET can be found in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANET is the current and near future hot topic for research, that has been targeted by many researchers to develop some applications and protocols specifically for the VANET. But a problem facing all VANET researchers is the unavailability of a formal specification language to specify the VANET systems, protocols, applications and scenarios proposed by those researchers. A specification language is a formal language that is used during the systems design, analysis, and requirements analysis. Using a formal specification language, a researcher can show “What his system does”, Not How. As a contribution of our research we have created a formal specification language for VANET. We made the use of some Romans characters & some basic symbols to represent VANET Systems & Applications. In addition, we have created some combined symbols to represent actions and operations of the VANET system and its participating devices. Our formal specification language covers many of the VANET aspects, and offers Validity Test and Consistency Test for the systems. Using our specification language, we have presented three different case studies based on a VANET system model we have created and put them into the system validity and consistency tests and showed how to describe a VANET system and its applications using our formal specification language

Formal Specification and Verification of Mobile Agent Systems

Mobile agent systems offer efficiency and flexibility as a design paradigm. These two characteristics allow to these systems to be an adequate solution for many problems. These systems are used in many critical domains. This expansion, in use, obliges designers to insure the reliability and correctness of such systems. Formal methods can be used to verify thecorrectness of these systems. This paper presents a formal specification and verification of mobile agent systems using the High Order π-calculus. The verification exploits the twotools UPPAAL and SPIN

Constructive tool design for formal languages : from semantics to executing models

Embedded, distributed, real-time, electronic systems are becoming more and more dominant in our lives. Hidden in cars, televisions, mp3-players, mobile phones and other appliances, these hardware/software systems influence our daily activities. Their design can be a huge effort and has to be carried out by engineers in a limited amount of time. Computer-aided modelling and design automation shorten the design cycle of these systems enabling companies to deliver their products sooner than their competitors. The design process is divided into different levels of abstraction, starting with a vague product idea (abstract) and ending up with a concrete description ready for implementation. Recently, research has started to focus on the system level, being a promising new area at which the product design could start. This dissertation develops a constructive approach to building tools for system-level design/description/modelling/specification languages, and shows the applicability of this method to the system-level language POOSL (Parallel Object-Oriented Specification Language). The formal semantics of this language is redefined and partly redeveloped, adding probabilistic features, real-time, inheritance, concurrency within processes, dynamic ports and atomic (indivisible) expressions, making the language suitable for performance analysis/modelling. The semantics is two-layered, using a probabilistic denotational semantics for stating the meaning of POOSL’s data layer, and using a probabilistic structural operational semantics for the process layer and architecture layer. The constructive approach has yielded the system-level simulation tool rotalumis, capable of executing large industrial designs, which has been demonstrated by two successful case studies—an ATM-packet switch (in conjunction with IBM Research at Z¨urich) and a packet routing switch for the Internet (in association with Alcatel/Bell at Antwerp). The more generally applicable optimisations of the execution engine (rotalumis) and the decisions taken in its design are discussed in full detail. Prototyping, where the system-level model functions as a part of the prototype implementation of the designed product, is supported by rotalumis-rt, a real-time variant of the execution engine. The viability of prototyping is shown by a case study of a learning infrared remote control, partially realised in hardware and completed with a system-level model. Keywords formal languages / formal specification / modelling languages / systemlevel design / embedded systems / real-time systems / performance analysis / discrete event simulation / probabilistic process algebra / design automation / prototyping / simulation tool

Formal Specification Language for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a form of Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (wireless Network), originally used to provide safety & comfort for passengers, & currently being used to establish Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) among near by Vehicles (V2V Communications) and between vehicles and nearby fixed infrastructure equipments; Roadside equipments (V2I Communications). VANET was used also to warn drivers of collision possibilities, road sign alarms, auto-payment at road tolls and parks. Usually VANET can be found in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANET is the current and near future hot topic for research, that has been targeted by many researchers to develop some applications and protocols specifically for the VANET. But a problem facing all VANET researchers is the unavailability of a formal specification language to specify the VANET systems, protocols, applications and scenarios proposed by those researchers. A specification language is a formal language that is used during the systems design, analysis, and requirements analysis. Using a formal specification language, a researcher can show “What his system does”, Not How. As a contribution of our research we have created a formal specification language for VANET. We made the use of some Romans characters & some basic symbols to represent VANET Systems & Applications. In addition, we have created some combined symbols to represent actions and operations of the VANET system and its participating devices. Our formal specification language covers many of the VANET aspects, and offers Validity Test and Consistency Test for the systems. Using our specification language, we have presented three different case studies based on a VANET system model we have created and put them into the system validity and consistency tests and showed how to describe a VANET system and its applications using our formal specification language

Evolvable Smartphone-Based Platforms for Point-Of-Care In-Vitro Diagnostics Applications

The association of smart mobile devices and lab-on-chip technologies offers unprecedented opportunities for the emergence of direct-to-consumer in vitro medical diagnostics applications. Despite their clear transformative potential, obstacles remain to the large-scale disruption and long-lasting success of these systems in the consumer market. For instance, the increasing level of complexity of instrumented lab-on-chip devices, coupled to the sporadic nature of point-of-care testing, threatens the viability of a business model mainly relying on disposable/consumable lab-on-chips. We argued recently that system evolvability, defined as the design characteristic that facilitates more manageable transitions between system generations via the modification of an inherited design, can help remedy these limitations. In this paper, we discuss how platform-based design can constitute a formal entry point to the design and implementation of evolvable smart device/lab-on-chip systems. We present both a hardware/software design framework and the implementation details of a platform prototype enabling at this stage the interfacing of several lab-on-chip variants relying on current- or impedance-based biosensors. Our findings suggest that several change-enabling mechanisms implemented in the higher abstraction software layers of the system can promote evolvability, together with the design of change-absorbing hardware/software interfaces. Our platform architecture is based on a mobile software application programming interface coupled to a modular hardware accessory. It allows the specification of lab-on-chip operation and post-analytic functions at the mobile software layer. We demonstrate its potential by operating a simple lab-on-chip to carry out the detection of dopamine using various electroanalytical methods

SDL based validation of a node monitoring protocol

Mobile ad hoc network is a wireless, self-configured, infrastructureless network of mobile nodes. The nodes are highly mobile, which makes the application running on them face network related problems like node failure, link failure, network level disconnection, scarcity of resources, buffer degradation, and intermittent disconnection etc. Node failure and Network fault are need to be monitored continuously by supervising the network status. Node monitoring protocol is crucial, so it is required to test the protocol exhaustively to verify and validate the functionality and accuracy of the designed protocol. This paper presents a validation model for Node Monitoring Protocol using Specification and Description Llanguage (SDL) using both Static Agent (SA) and Mobile Agent (MA). We have verified properties of the Node Monitoring Protocol (NMP) based on the global states with no exits, deadlock states or proper termination states using reachability graph. Message Sequence Chart (MSC) gives an intuitive understanding of the described system behavior with varying node density and complex behavior etc.Comment: 16 pages, 24 figures, International Conference of Networks, Communications, Wireless and Mobile 201

Proceedings of International Workshop "Global Computing: Programming Environments, Languages, Security and Analysis of Systems"

According to the IST/ FET proactive initiative on GLOBAL COMPUTING, the goal is to obtain techniques (models, frameworks, methods, algorithms) for constructing systems that are flexible, dependable, secure, robust and efficient. The dominant concerns are not those of representing and manipulating data efficiently but rather those of handling the co-ordination and interaction, security, reliability, robustness, failure modes, and control of risk of the entities in the system and the overall design, description and performance of the system itself. Completely different paradigms of computer science may have to be developed to tackle these issues effectively. The research should concentrate on systems having the following characteristics: • The systems are composed of autonomous computational entities where activity is not centrally controlled, either because global control is impossible or impractical, or because the entities are created or controlled by different owners. • The computational entities are mobile, due to the movement of the physical platforms or by movement of the entity from one platform to another. • The configuration varies over time. For instance, the system is open to the introduction of new computational entities and likewise their deletion. The behaviour of the entities may vary over time. • The systems operate with incomplete information about the environment. For instance, information becomes rapidly out of date and mobility requires information about the environment to be discovered. The ultimate goal of the research action is to provide a solid scientific foundation for the design of such systems, and to lay the groundwork for achieving effective principles for building and analysing such systems. This workshop covers the aspects related to languages and programming environments as well as analysis of systems and resources involving 9 projects (AGILE , DART, DEGAS , MIKADO, MRG, MYTHS, PEPITO, PROFUNDIS, SECURE) out of the 13 founded under the initiative. After an year from the start of the projects, the goal of the workshop is to fix the state of the art on the topics covered by the two clusters related to programming environments and analysis of systems as well as to devise strategies and new ideas to profitably continue the research effort towards the overall objective of the initiative. We acknowledge the Dipartimento di Informatica and Tlc of the University of Trento, the Comune di Rovereto, the project DEGAS for partially funding the event and the Events and Meetings Office of the University of Trento for the valuable collaboration

Requirements traceability in model-driven development: Applying model and transformation conformance

The variety of design artifacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate relationship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship, which helps in assessing the quality of models, realizations and transformation specifications. Our framework is a basis for understanding requirements traceability in model-driven development, as well as for the design of tools that support requirements traceability in model-driven development processes. We propose a notion of conformance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations