Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

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

Causality in concurrent systems

Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal terminology to describe and analyse the relations between the actions in these systems. However, a thorough discussion about the meaning of causality in such a context has not been developed yet. This paper aims to fill the gap. First, the paper analyses the notion of causation in concurrent systems and attempts to build bridges with the existing philosophical literature, highlighting similarities and divergences between them. Second, the paper analyses the use of counterfactual reasoning in ex-post analysis in concurrent systems (i.e. execution trace analysis).Comment: This is an interdisciplinary paper. It addresses a class of causal models developed in computer science from an epistemic perspective, namely in terms of philosophy of causalit

Knowledge infrastructures for software service architectures

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components or services. The selection of software services from service repositories and their integration into software system architectures, but also the development of services for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these services. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software services can be addressed. We investigate how this information space for software services can be organized. Focal point are ontologies that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at the Web Services Framework and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framework

Formal methods and tools for the development of distributed and real time systems : Esprit Project 3096 (SPEC)

The Basic Research Action No. 3096, Formal Methods snd Tools for the Development of Distributed and Real Time Systems, is funded in the Area of Computer Science, under the ESPRIT Programme of the European Community. The coordinating institution is the Department of Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the participating Institutions are the Institute of Computer Science of Crete. the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, the Programmimg Research Group of the University of Oxford, and the Computer Science Departments of the University of Manchester, Imperial College. Weizmann Institute of Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, IMAG Grenoble. Catholic University of Nijmegen, and the University of Liege. This document contains the synopsis. and part of the sections on objectives and area of advance, on baseline and rationale, on research goals, and on organisation of the action, as contained in the original proposal, submitted June, 198S. The section on the state of the art (18 pages) and the full list of references (21 pages) of the original proposal have been deleted because of limitation of available space

A Logical Verification Methodology for Service-Oriented Computing

We introduce a logical verification methodology for checking behavioural properties of service-oriented computing systems. Service properties are described by means of SocL, a branching-time temporal logic that we have specifically designed to express in an effective way distinctive aspects of services, such as, e.g., acceptance of a request, provision of a response, and correlation among service requests and responses. Our approach allows service properties to be expressed in such a way that they can be independent of service domains and specifications. We show an instantiation of our general methodology that uses the formal language COWS to conveniently specify services and the expressly developed software tool CMC to assist the user in the task of verifying SocL formulae over service specifications. We demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of our methodology by means of the specification and the analysis of a case study in the automotive domain

Model Checking Dynamic-Epistemic Spatial Logic

In this paper we focus on Dynamic Spatial Logic, the extension of Hennessy-Milner logic with the parallel operator. We develop a sound complete Hilbert-style axiomatic system for it comprehending the behavior of spatial operators in relation with dynamic/temporal ones. Underpining on a new congruence we define over the class of processes - the structural bisimulation - we prove the finite model property for this logic that provides the decidability for satisfiability, validity and model checking against process semantics. Eventualy we propose algorithms for validity, satisfiability and model checking