1,197 research outputs found
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
Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents
The research field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) aims to find
abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling, verifying,
validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as Multiagent
Systems (MASs). A very lively research sub-field studies how formal methods can
be used for AOSE. This paper presents a detailed survey of six logic-based
executable agent specification languages that have been chosen for their
potential to be integrated in our ARPEGGIO project, an open framework for
specifying and prototyping a MAS. The six languages are ConGoLog, Agent-0, the
IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Concurrent METATEM and Ehhf. For each
executable language, the logic foundations are described and an example of use
is shown. A comparison of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches
complete the paper, together with considerations of the advantages of using
logic-based languages in MAS modeling and prototyping.Comment: 67 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by the Journal
"Theory and Practice of Logic Programming", volume 4, Maurice Bruynooghe
Editor-in-Chie
State-of-the-art on evolution and reactivity
This report starts by, in Chapter 1, outlining aspects of querying and updating resources on
the Web and on the Semantic Web, including the development of query and update languages
to be carried out within the Rewerse project.
From this outline, it becomes clear that several existing research areas and topics are of
interest for this work in Rewerse. In the remainder of this report we further present state of
the art surveys in a selection of such areas and topics. More precisely: in Chapter 2 we give
an overview of logics for reasoning about state change and updates; Chapter 3 is devoted to briefly describing existing update languages for the Web, and also for updating logic programs;
in Chapter 4 event-condition-action rules, both in the context of active database systems and
in the context of semistructured data, are surveyed; in Chapter 5 we give an overview of some relevant rule-based agents frameworks
A Survey of Languages for Specifying Dynamics: A Knowledge Engineering Perspective
A number of formal specification languages for knowledge-based systems has been developed. Characteristics for knowledge-based systems are a complex knowledge base and an inference engine which uses this knowledge to solve a given problem. Specification languages for knowledge-based systems have to cover both aspects. They have to provide the means to specify a complex and large amount of knowledge and they have to provide the means to specify the dynamic reasoning behavior of a knowledge-based system. We focus on the second aspect. For this purpose, we survey existing approaches for specifying dynamic behavior in related areas of research. In fact, we have taken approaches for the specification of information systems (Language for Conceptual Modeling and TROLL), approaches for the specification of database updates and logic programming (Transaction Logic and Dynamic Database Logic) and the generic specification framework of abstract state machine
The inheritance of dynamic and deontic integrity constraints or: Does the boss have more rights?
In [18,23], we presented a language for the specification of static, dynamic and deontic integrity constraints (IC's) for conceptual models (CM's). An important problem not discussed in that paper is how IC's are inherited in a taxonomic network of types. For example, if students are permitted to perform certain actions under certain preconditions, must we repeat these preconditions when specializing this action for the subtype of graduate students, or are they inherited, and if so, how? For static constraints, this problem is relatively trivial, but for dynamic and deontic constraints, it will turn out that it contains numerous pitfalls, caused by the fact that common sense supplies presuppositions about the structure of IC inheritance that are not warranted by logic. In this paper, we unravel some of these presuppositions and show how to avoid the pitfalls. We first formulate a number of general theorems about the inheritance of necessary and/or sufficient conditions and show that for upward inheritance, a closure assumption is needed. We apply this to dynamic and deontic IC's, where conditions arepreconditions of actions, and show that our common sense is sometimes mistaken about the logical implications of what we have specified. We also show the connection of necessary and sufficient preconditions of actions with the specification of weakest preconditions in programming logic. Finally, we argue that information analysts usually assume constraint completion in the specification of (pre)conditions analogous to predicate completion in Prolog and circumscription in non-monotonic logic. The results are illustrated with numerous examples and compared with other approaches in the literature
10351 Abstracts Collection -- Modelling, Controlling and Reasoning About State
From 29 August 2010 to 3 September 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10351
``Modelling, Controlling and Reasoning About State \u27\u27 was held in
Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the
seminar, several participants presented their current research, and
ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the
presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar
results and ideas are put together in this paper. Links to extended
abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Super Logic Programs
The Autoepistemic Logic of Knowledge and Belief (AELB) is a powerful
nonmonotic formalism introduced by Teodor Przymusinski in 1994. In this paper,
we specialize it to a class of theories called `super logic programs'. We argue
that these programs form a natural generalization of standard logic programs.
In particular, they allow disjunctions and default negation of arbibrary
positive objective formulas.
Our main results are two new and powerful characterizations of the static
semant ics of these programs, one syntactic, and one model-theoretic. The
syntactic fixed point characterization is much simpler than the fixed point
construction of the static semantics for arbitrary AELB theories. The
model-theoretic characterization via Kripke models allows one to construct
finite representations of the inherently infinite static expansions.
Both characterizations can be used as the basis of algorithms for query
answering under the static semantics. We describe a query-answering interpreter
for super programs which we developed based on the model-theoretic
characterization and which is available on the web.Comment: 47 pages, revised version of the paper submitted 10/200
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