On Formal Choreographic Modelling: A Case Study in EU Business Processes

International audienceFormal choreographic modelling advocates a correctness-byconstruction principle for the development of sound communication protocols. This principle usually hinges on syntactic or semantic restrictions to rule out models that could lead to communication glitches like message losses or deadlocks. This paper explores how these restrictions impact on the usability of formal modelling. More precisely, we benchmark the use of a formal choreographic modelling language designed to support the correctnessby-construction principle of message-passing systems. To this purpose, we consider the formal choreographic modelling of real business processes taken from the official documentation of European customs business process models. In fact, following a steadily increasing trend, the European Union started to use BPMN to support the legal provisions of the customs business process models

(edited by) Proceedings 9th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, ICE 2016, Heraklion, Greece, 8-9 June 2016

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE 2016, the 9th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, which was held in Heraklion, Greece on the 8th and 9th of June 2016 as a satellite event of DisCoTec 2016. 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 discussion forum whose access is restricted to the authors and to all the PC members not declaring a conflict of interest. The PC members post comments and questions that the authors reply to. For the first time, the 2016 edition of ICE included a feature targeting review transparency: reviews of accepted papers were made public on the workshop website and workshop participants in particular were able to access them during the workshop. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, and altogether nine papers were accepted for publication (the workshop also featured three brief announcements which are not part of this volume). We were proud to host two invited talks, by Alexandra Silva and Uwe Nestmann. The abstracts of these two talks are included in this volume together with the regular papers

Software development by abstract behavioural specification

The development process of any software has become extremely important not just in the IT industry, but in almost every business or domain of research. The effort in making this process quick, efficient, reliable and automated has constantly evolved into a flow that delivers software incrementally based on both the developer's best skills and the end user's feedback. Software modeling and modeling languages have the purpose of facilitating product development by designing correct and reliable applications. The concurrency model of the Abstract Behavioural Specification (ABS) Language with features for asynchronous programming and cooperative scheduling is an important example of how modeling contributes to the reliability and robustness of a product. By abstracting from the implementation details, program complexity and inner workings of libraries, software modeling, and specifically ABS, allow for an easier use of formal analysis techniques and proofs to support product design. However there is still a gap that exists between modeling languages and programming languages with the process of software development often going on two separate paths with respect to modeling and implementation. This potentially introduces errors and doubles the development effort. \par The overall objective of this research is bridging the gap between modeling and programming in order to provide a smooth integration between formal methods and two of the most well-known and used languages for software development, the Java and Scala languages. The research focuses mainly on sequential and highly parallelizable applications, but part of the research also involves some theoretical proposals for distributed systems. It is a first step towards having a programming language with support for formal models. Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Session-based concurrency: between operational and declarative views

Communication-based software is ubiquitous nowadays. From e-banking to e-shopping, online activities often involve message exchanges between software components. These interactions are often governed by protocols that explicitly describe the sequences of communication actions that should be executed by each component. Crucially, these protocols are not isolated from a program’s context: external conditions such as timing constraints or exceptional events that occur during execution can affect message exchanges. As an additional difficulty, individual components are typically developed in different programming languages. In this setting, certifying that a program conforms to its intended protocols is challenging. A widely studied program verification technique uses behavioral type systems, which exploit abstract representations of these protocols to check that the program executes communication actions as intended. Unfortunately, the abstractions offered by behavioral type systems may neglect the influence that external conditions have on the program. This thesis addresses this issue by considering programming languages with declarative features, in which the governing conditions of the program can be adequately described. Our work develops correct translations between programming languages to show that languages with declarative features can indeed articulate a unified view of communication-based programs. Specifically, these translations demonstrate that the operational features of communication-based programs can be correctly represented by languages with declarative features. An additional contribution is a hybrid language that combines the best of both worlds, enabling the analysis of operational and declarative features in communication-based programs