Behavioural Preorders on Stochastic Systems - Logical, Topological, and Computational Aspects

Computer systems can be found everywhere: in space, in our homes, in our cars, in our pockets, and sometimes even in our own bodies. For concerns of safety, economy, and convenience, it is important that such systems work correctly. However, it is a notoriously difficult task to ensure that the software running on computers behaves correctly. One approach to ease this task is that of model checking, where a model of the system is made using some mathematical formalism. Requirements expressed in a formal language can then be verified against the model in order to give guarantees that the model satisfies the requirements. For many computer systems, time is an important factor. As such, we need our formalisms and requirement languages to be able to incorporate real time. We therefore develop formalisms and algorithms that allow us to compare and express properties about real-time systems. We first introduce a logical formalism for reasoning about upper and lower bounds on time, and study the properties of this formalism, including axiomatisation and algorithms for checking when a formula is satisfied. We then consider the question of when a system is faster than another system. We show that this is a difficult question which can not be answered in general, but we identify special cases where this question can be answered. We also show that under this notion of faster-than, a local increase in speed may lead to a global decrease in speed, and we take step towards avoiding this. Finally, we consider how to compare the real-time behaviour of systems not just qualitatively, but also quantitatively. Thus, we are interested in knowing how much one system is faster or slower than another system. This is done by introducing a distance between systems. We show how to compute this distance and that it behaves well with respect to certain properties.Comment: PhD dissertation from Aalborg Universit

Continuous-time temporal logic specification and verification for nonlinear biological systems in uncertain contexts

In this thesis we introduce a complete framework for modelling and verification of biological systems in uncertain contexts based on the bond-calculus process algebra and the LBUC spatio-temporal logic. The bond-calculus is a biological process algebra which captures complex patterns of interaction based on affinity patterns, a novel communication mechanism using pattern matching to express multiway interaction affinities and general kinetic laws, whilst retaining an agent-centric modelling style for biomolecular species. The bond-calculus is equipped with a novel continuous semantics which maps models to systems of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) in a compositional way. We then extend the bond-calculus to handle uncertain models, featuring interval uncertainties in their species concentrations and reaction rate parameters. Our semantics is also extended to handle uncertainty in every aspect of a model, producing non-deterministic continuous systems whose behaviour depends either on time-independent uncertain parameters and initial conditions, corresponding to our partial knowledge of the system at hand, or time-varying uncertain inputs, corresponding to genuine variability in a system’s behaviour based on environmental factors. This language is then coupled with the LBUC spatio-temporal logic which combines Signal Temporal Logic (STL) temporal operators with an uncertain context operator which quantifies over an uncertain context model describing the range of environments over which a property must hold. We develop model-checking procedures for STL and LBUC properties based on verified signal monitoring over flowpipes produced by the Flow* verified integrator, including the technique of masking which directs monitoring for atomic propositions to time regions relevant to the overall verification problem at hand. This allows us to monitor many interesting nested contextual properties and frequently reduces monitoring costs by an order of magnitude. Finally, we explore the technique of contextual signal monitoring which can use a single Flow* flowpipe representing a functional dependency to complete a whole tree of signals corresponding to different uncertain contexts. This allows us to produce refined monitoring results over the whole space and to explore the variation in system behaviour in different contexts

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 10980 and 10981 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 52 full and 13 tool papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques, from algorithmic and logical foundations of verification to practical applications in distributed, networked, cyber-physical, and autonomous systems. They are organized in topical sections on model checking, program analysis using polyhedra, synthesis, learning, runtime verification, hybrid and timed systems, tools, probabilistic systems, static analysis, theory and security, SAT, SMT and decisions procedures, concurrency, and CPS, hardware, industrial applications

Computer Aided Verification

This open access two-volume set LNCS 10980 and 10981 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification, CAV 2018, held in Oxford, UK, in July 2018. The 52 full and 13 tool papers presented together with 3 invited papers and 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques, from algorithmic and logical foundations of verification to practical applications in distributed, networked, cyber-physical, and autonomous systems. They are organized in topical sections on model checking, program analysis using polyhedra, synthesis, learning, runtime verification, hybrid and timed systems, tools, probabilistic systems, static analysis, theory and security, SAT, SMT and decisions procedures, concurrency, and CPS, hardware, industrial applications

Revisiting logical semantics for processes and their distances

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, leída el 2-02-2016Esta tesis se enmarca en el amplio campo de la teoría de la concurrencia. Más específicamente, nos centramos en el estudio de las relaciones de similitud entre procesos concurrentes. Comenzamos estudiando la bisimulación, considerada la más importante de estas relaciones, y vemos después cómo podemos extender nuestros resultados al resto de las semánticas de procesos estudiadas durante las últimas décadas. En particular, nuestra contribución a la comunidad científica, se centra en dos puntos principales: – El desarrollo de una caracterización lógica uniforme de las semánticas de procesos: proponemos un esquema lógico común (enmarcado en la conocida lógica modal de Hennessy-Milner) e incluimos las diferentes semánticas en este esquema, enfatizando las diferencias y similitudes entre ellas, que se presentan del modo más claro posible. – La presentación de una nueva noción de distancia, tanto entre procesos finitos como infinitos: la misma se diferencia de las anteriormente propuestas en su carácter global, que acumula las diferencias que aportan los distintos cómputos, en lugar de quedarnos con la máxima de ellas...This thesis can be included in the broad field of concurrency theory. More specifically, we focus on the study of the similarities between concurrent processes. We start from bisimulation, the main of these relations, and then we see how we can extend the obtained results to the rest of the semantics developed along the last years. In particular, our main contributions can be roughly described by the following two items: – The development of a unified logical characterization of process semantics: we propose a common logical scheme (within the framework of the well known Hennessy-Milner Logic) and we set the different semantics in this scheme by emphasizing, in the clearest possible way, the (dis)similarities between them. – We present a new notion of distance for both finite and infinite processes. This novel notion differs from the previously available ones in its global character: instead of taking the maximum disagreement between the two compared processes, it adds all the differences provided by their whole sets of computations...Depto. de Sistemas Informáticos y ComputaciónFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum