Design and Optimisation of the FlyFast Front-end for Attribute-based Coordination

Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS) consist of a large number of interacting objects. The design of such systems requires scalable analysis tools and methods, which have necessarily to rely on some form of approximation of the system's actual behaviour. Promising techniques are those based on mean-field approximation. The FlyFast model-checker uses an on-the-fly algorithm for bounded PCTL model-checking of selected individual(s) in the context of very large populations whose global behaviour is approximated using deterministic limit mean-field techniques. Recently, a front-end for FlyFast has been proposed which provides a modelling language, PiFF in the sequel, for the Predicate-based Interaction for FlyFast. In this paper we present details of PiFF design and an approach to state-space reduction based on probabilistic bisimulation for inhomogeneous DTMCs.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2017, arXiv:1707.0366

Proceedings 6th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, ICE 2013, Florence, Italy, 6th June 2013

International audienceThis volume contains the proceedings of ICE'13, the 6th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop, which was held in Florence, Italy on the 6th of June 2013 as a satellite event of DisCoTec'13. The ICE workshop series has a main distinguishing aspect: the workshop features a novel review and selection procedure. The previous editions of ICE were affiliated to ICALP'08 (Reykjavik, Iceland), CONCUR'09 (Bologna, Italy), DisCoTec'10 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), DisCoTec'11 (Reykjavik, Iceland) and DisCoTec'12 (Stockholm, Sweden). The ICE procedure for paper selection allows PC members to interact, anonymously, with authors. During the review phase, each submitted paper is published on a forum and associated with a discussion forum whose access is restricted to the authors and to all the PC members not declaring a conflict of interests. The PC members post comments and questions that the authors reply to. As at the past five editions, the forum discussion during the review and selection phase of ICE'13 has considerably improved the accuracy of the feedback from the reviewers and the quality of accepted papers, and offered the basis for a lively discussion during the workshop. The interactive selection procedure implies additional effort for both authors and PC members. The effort and time spent in the forum interaction is rewarding for both authors ― when updating their papers ― and reviewers ― when writing their reviews: the forum discussion helps to discover and correct typos in key definitions and mispelled statements, to improve examples and presentation of critical cases, and solve any misunderstanding at the very early stage of the review process. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, and altogether 6 papers were accepted for publication. We were proud to host two invited talks by Davide Sangiorgi and Filippo Bonchi, whose abstracts are included in this volume together with the regular papers. The workshop also featured a brief announcement of an already published paper. Final versions of the contributions, taking into account the discussion at the workshop, are included in the same order as they were presented at the workshop. We would like to thank the authors of all the submitted papers for their interest in the workshop and the PC members for their efforts, which provided for the success of the ICE workshop. We thank Davide Sangiorgi and Filippo Bonchi for accepting our invitations to present their recent work, and the DisCoTec'13 organisers, in particular the general and workshop chairs, for providing an excellent environment for the preparation and staging of the event. Finally, we thank EPTCS editors for the publication of post-proceedings

A document based traceability model for test management

Software testing has became more complicated in the emergence of distributed network, real-time environment, third party software enablers and the need to test system at multiple integration levels. These scenarios have created more concern over the quality of software testing. The quality of software has been deteriorating due to inefficient and ineffective testing activities. One of the main flaws is due to ineffective use of test management to manage software documentations. In documentations, it is difficult to detect and trace bugs in some related documents of which traceability is the major concern. Currently, various studies have been conducted on test management, however very few have focused on document traceability in particular to support the error propagation with respect to documentation. The objective of this thesis is to develop a new traceability model that integrates software engineering documents to support test management. The artefacts refer to requirements, design, source code, test description and test result. The proposed model managed to tackle software traceability in both forward and backward propagations by implementing multi-bidirectional pointer. This platform enabled the test manager to navigate and capture a set of related artefacts to support test management process. A new prototype was developed to facilitate observation of software traceability on all related artefacts across the entire documentation lifecycle. The proposed model was then applied to a case study of a finished software development project with a complete set of software documents called the On-Board Automobile (OBA). The proposed model was evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively using the feature analysis, precision and recall, and expert validation. The evaluation results proved that the proposed model and its prototype were justified and significant to support test management

Collective Adaptive Systems: Qualitative and Quantitative Modelling and Analysis (Dagstuhl Seminar 14512)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14512 "Collective Adaptive Systems: Qualitative and Quantitative Modelling and Analysis". Besides presentations on current work in the area, the seminar focused on the following topics: (i) Modelling techniques and languages for collective adaptive systems based on the above formalisms. (ii) Verification of collective adaptive systems. (iii) Humans-in-the-loop in collective adaptive systems

Specification and Verification of Contract-Based Applications

Nowadays emerging paradigms are being adopted by several companies, where applications are built by assembling loosely-coupled distributed components, called services. Services may belong to possibly mutual distrusted organizations and may have conflicting goals. New methodologies for designing and verifying these applications are necessary for coping with new scenarios in which a service does not adhere with its prescribed behaviour, namely its contract. The thesis tackles this problem by proposing techniques for specifying and verifying distributed applications. The first contribution is an automata-based model checking technique for ensuring both service compliance and security requirements in a composition of services. We further develop the automata-based approach by proposing a novel formal model of contracts based on tailored finite state automata, called contract automata. The proposed model features several notions of contract agreement described from a language-theoretic perspective, for characterising the modalities in which the duties and requirements of services are fulfilled. Contract automata are equipped with different composition operators, to uniformly model both single and composite services, and techniques for synthesising an orchestrator to enforce the properties of agreement. Algorithms for verifying these properties are introduced, based on control theory and linear programming techniques. The formalism assumes the existence of possible malicious components trying to break the overall agreement, and techniques for detecting and banning eventually liable services are described. We study the conditions for dismissing the central orchestrator in order to generate a distributed choreography of services, analysing both closed and open choreographed systems, with synchronous or asynchronous interactions. We relate contract automata with different intutionistic logics for contracts, introduced for solving mutual circular dependencies between the requirements and the obligations of the parties, with either linear or non-linear availability of resources. Finally, a prototypical tool implementing the theory developed in the thesis is presented

Proceedings 6th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, ICE 2013

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE 2013, the 6th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop, which was held in Florence, Italy on the 6th of June 2013 as a satellite event of DisCoTec 2013. The ICE procedure for paper selection allows PC members to interact, anonymously, with authors. During the review phase, each submitted paper is published on a Wiki and associated with a discussion forum whose access is restricted to the authors and to all the PC members not declaring a conflict of interests. The PC members post comments and questions that the authors reply to. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, and altogether 6 papers were accepted for publication. We were proud to host two invited talks, Davide Sangiorgi and Filippo Bonchi, whose abstracts are included in this volume together with the regular papers. The workshop also featured a brief announcement of an already published paper

Computational Intelligence and Human- Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI’s journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human–Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human–computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations

Book of short Abstracts of the 11th International Symposium on Digital Earth

The Booklet is a collection of accepted short abstracts of the ISDE11 Symposium