18,167 research outputs found
Lost in Abstraction: Monotonicity in Multi-Threaded Programs (Extended Technical Report)
Monotonicity in concurrent systems stipulates that, in any global state,
extant system actions remain executable when new processes are added to the
state. This concept is not only natural and common in multi-threaded software,
but also useful: if every thread's memory is finite, monotonicity often
guarantees the decidability of safety property verification even when the
number of running threads is unknown. In this paper, we show that the act of
obtaining finite-data thread abstractions for model checking can be at odds
with monotonicity: Predicate-abstracting certain widely used monotone software
results in non-monotone multi-threaded Boolean programs - the monotonicity is
lost in the abstraction. As a result, well-established sound and complete
safety checking algorithms become inapplicable; in fact, safety checking turns
out to be undecidable for the obtained class of unbounded-thread Boolean
programs. We demonstrate how the abstract programs can be modified into
monotone ones, without affecting safety properties of the non-monotone
abstraction. This significantly improves earlier approaches of enforcing
monotonicity via overapproximations
Traffic Network Control from Temporal Logic Specifications
We propose a framework for generating a signal control policy for a traffic
network of signalized intersections to accomplish control objectives
expressible using linear temporal logic. By applying techniques from model
checking and formal methods, we obtain a correct-by-construction controller
that is guaranteed to satisfy complex specifications. To apply these tools, we
identify and exploit structural properties particular to traffic networks that
allow for efficient computation of a finite state abstraction. In particular,
traffic networks exhibit a componentwise monotonicity property which allows
reach set computations that scale linearly with the dimension of the continuous
state space
Testing Top Monotonicity
Top monotonicity is a relaxation of various well-known domain restrictions
such as single-peaked and single-crossing for which negative impossibility
results are circumvented and for which the median-voter theorem still holds. We
examine the problem of testing top monotonicity and present a characterization
of top monotonicity with respect to non-betweenness constraints. We then extend
the definition of top monotonicity to partial orders and show that testing top
monotonicity of partial orders is NP-complete
On Deadlockability, Liveness and Reversibility in Subclasses of Weighted Petri Nets
International audienceLiveness, (non-)deadlockability and reversibility are behavioral properties of Petri nets that are fundamental for many real-world systems. Such properties are often required to be mono-tonic, meaning preserved upon any increase of the marking. However, their checking is intractable in general and their monotonicity is not always satisfied. To simplify the analysis of these features, structural approaches have been fruitfully exploited in particular subclasses of Petri nets, deriving the behavior from the underlying graph and the initial marking only, often in polynomial time. In this paper, we further develop these efficient structural methods to analyze deadlockability, live-ness, reversibility and their monotonicity in weighted Petri nets. We focus on the join-free subclass, which forbids synchronizations, and on the homogeneous asymmetric-choice subclass, which allows conflicts and synchronizations in a restricted fashion. For the join-free nets, we provide several structural conditions for checking liveness, (non-)deadlock-ability, reversibility and their monotonicity. Some of these methods operate in polynomial time. Furthermore , in this class, we show that liveness, non-deadlockability and reversibility, taken together or separately, are not always monotonic, even under the assumptions of structural boundedness and structural liveness. These facts delineate more sharply the frontier between monotonicity and non-monotonicity of the behavior in weighted Petri nets, present already in the join-free subclass. In addition, we use part of this new material to correct a flaw in the proof of a previous characterization of monotonic liveness and boundedness for homogeneous asymmetric-choice nets, published in 2004 and left unnoticed
Coverage and Vacuity in Network Formation Games
The frameworks of coverage and vacuity in formal verification analyze the effect of mutations applied to systems or their specifications. We adopt these notions to network formation games, analyzing the effect of a change in the cost of a resource. We consider two measures to be affected: the cost of the Social Optimum and extremums of costs of Nash Equilibria. Our results offer a formal framework to the effect of mutations in network formation games and include a complexity analysis of related decision problems. They also tighten the relation between algorithmic game theory and formal verification, suggesting refined definitions of coverage and vacuity for the latter
A Forward Reachability Algorithm for Bounded Timed-Arc Petri Nets
Timed-arc Petri nets (TAPN) are a well-known time extension of the Petri net
model and several translations to networks of timed automata have been proposed
for this model. We present a direct, DBM-based algorithm for forward
reachability analysis of bounded TAPNs extended with transport arcs, inhibitor
arcs and age invariants. We also give a complete proof of its correctness,
including reduction techniques based on symmetries and extrapolation. Finally,
we augment the algorithm with a novel state-space reduction technique
introducing a monotonic ordering on markings and prove its soundness even in
the presence of monotonicity-breaking features like age invariants and
inhibitor arcs. We implement the algorithm within the model-checker TAPAAL and
the experimental results document an encouraging performance compared to
verification approaches that translate TAPN models to UPPAAL timed automata.Comment: In Proceedings SSV 2012, arXiv:1211.587
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