80,419 research outputs found
Reachability Analysis of Time Basic Petri Nets: a Time Coverage Approach
We introduce a technique for reachability analysis of Time-Basic (TB) Petri
nets, a powerful formalism for real- time systems where time constraints are
expressed as intervals, representing possible transition firing times, whose
bounds are functions of marking's time description. The technique consists of
building a symbolic reachability graph relying on a sort of time coverage, and
overcomes the limitations of the only available analyzer for TB nets, based in
turn on a time-bounded inspection of a (possibly infinite) reachability-tree.
The graph construction algorithm has been automated by a tool-set, briefly
described in the paper together with its main functionality and analysis
capability. A running example is used throughout the paper to sketch the
symbolic graph construction. A use case describing a small real system - that
the running example is an excerpt from - has been employed to benchmark the
technique and the tool-set. The main outcome of this test are also presented in
the paper. Ongoing work, in the perspective of integrating with a
model-checking engine, is shortly discussed.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to conference for publicatio
Ant-Inspired Density Estimation via Random Walks
Many ant species employ distributed population density estimation in
applications ranging from quorum sensing [Pra05], to task allocation [Gor99],
to appraisal of enemy colony strength [Ada90]. It has been shown that ants
estimate density by tracking encounter rates -- the higher the population
density, the more often the ants bump into each other [Pra05,GPT93].
We study distributed density estimation from a theoretical perspective. We
prove that a group of anonymous agents randomly walking on a grid are able to
estimate their density within a small multiplicative error in few steps by
measuring their rates of encounter with other agents. Despite dependencies
inherent in the fact that nearby agents may collide repeatedly (and, worse,
cannot recognize when this happens), our bound nearly matches what would be
required to estimate density by independently sampling grid locations.
From a biological perspective, our work helps shed light on how ants and
other social insects can obtain relatively accurate density estimates via
encounter rates. From a technical perspective, our analysis provides new tools
for understanding complex dependencies in the collision probabilities of
multiple random walks. We bound the strength of these dependencies using
of the underlying graph. Our results extend beyond
the grid to more general graphs and we discuss applications to size estimation
for social networks and density estimation for robot swarms
Faster Random Walks By Rewiring Online Social Networks On-The-Fly
Many online social networks feature restrictive web interfaces which only
allow the query of a user's local neighborhood through the interface. To enable
analytics over such an online social network through its restrictive web
interface, many recent efforts reuse the existing Markov Chain Monte Carlo
methods such as random walks to sample the social network and support analytics
based on the samples. The problem with such an approach, however, is the large
amount of queries often required (i.e., a long "mixing time") for a random walk
to reach a desired (stationary) sampling distribution.
In this paper, we consider a novel problem of enabling a faster random walk
over online social networks by "rewiring" the social network on-the-fly.
Specifically, we develop Modified TOpology (MTO)-Sampler which, by using only
information exposed by the restrictive web interface, constructs a "virtual"
overlay topology of the social network while performing a random walk, and
ensures that the random walk follows the modified overlay topology rather than
the original one. We show that MTO-Sampler not only provably enhances the
efficiency of sampling, but also achieves significant savings on query cost
over real-world online social networks such as Google Plus, Epinion etc.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figure, technical report for ICDE2013 paper. Appendix
has all the theorems' proofs; ICDE'201
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