A Category Theoretical Approach to the Concurrent Semantics of Rewriting: Adhesive Categories and Related Concepts

This thesis studies formal semantics for a family of rewriting formalisms that have arisen as category theoretical abstractions of the so-called algebraic approaches to graph rewriting. The latter in turn generalize and combine features of term rewriting and Petri nets. Two salient features of (the abstract versions of) graph rewriting are a suitable class of categories which captures the structure of the objects of rewriting, and a notion of independence or concurrency of rewriting steps – as in the theory of Petri nets. Category theoretical abstractions of graph rewriting such as double pushout rewriting encapsulate the complex details of the structures that are to be rewritten by considering them as objects of a suitable abstract category, for example an adhesive one. The main difficulty of the development of appropriate categorical frameworks is the identification of the essential properties of the category of graphs which allow to develop the theory of graph rewriting in an abstract framework. The motivations for such an endeavor are twofold: to arrive at a succint description of the fundamental principles of rewriting systems in general, and to apply well-established verification and analysis techniques of the theory of Petri nets (and also term rewriting systems) to a wide range of distributed and concurrent systems in which states have a "graph-like" structure. The contributions of this thesis thus can be considered as two sides of the same coin: on the one side, concepts and results for Petri nets (and graph grammars) are generalized to an abstract category theoretical setting; on the other side, suitable classes of "graph-like" categories which capture the essential properties of the category of graphs are identified. Two central results are the following: first, (concatenable) processes are faithful partial order representations of equivalence classes of system runs which only differ w.r.t. the rescheduling of causally independent events; second, the unfolding of a system is established as the canonical partial order representation of all possible events (following the work of Winskel). Weakly ω-adhesive categories are introduced as the theoretical foundation for the corresponding formal theorems about processes and unfoldings. The main result states that an unfolding procedure for systems which are given as single pushout grammars in weakly ω-adhesive categories exists and can be characetrised as a right adjoint functor from a category of grammars to the subcategory of occurrence grammars. This result specializes to and improves upon existing results concerning the coreflective semantics of the unfolding of graph grammars and Petri nets (under an individual token interpretation). Moreover, the unfolding procedure is in principle usable as the starting point for static analysis techniques such as McMillan’s finite complete prefix method. Finally, the adequacy of weakly ω-adhesive categories as a categorical framework is argued for by providing a comparison with the notion of topos, which is a standard abstraction of the categories of sets (and graphs)

Argument filterings and usable rules in higher-order rewrite systems

The static dependency pair method is a method for proving the termination of higher-order rewrite systems a la Nipkow. It combines the dependency pair method introduced for first-order rewrite systems with the notion of strong computability introduced for typed lambda-calculi. Argument filterings and usable rules are two important methods of the dependency pair framework used by current state-of-the-art first-order automated termination provers. In this paper, we extend the class of higher-order systems on which the static dependency pair method can be applied. Then, we extend argument filterings and usable rules to higher-order rewriting, hence providing the basis for a powerful automated termination prover for higher-order rewrite systems

Dynamic Dependency Pairs for Algebraic Functional Systems

We extend the higher-order termination method of dynamic dependency pairs to Algebraic Functional Systems (AFSs). In this setting, simply typed lambda-terms with algebraic reduction and separate {\beta}-steps are considered. For left-linear AFSs, the method is shown to be complete. For so-called local AFSs we define a variation of usable rules and an extension of argument filterings. All these techniques have been implemented in the higher-order termination tool WANDA

Size-Change Termination as a Contract

Termination is an important but undecidable program property, which has led to a large body of work on static methods for conservatively predicting or enforcing termination. One such method is the size-change termination approach of Lee, Jones, and Ben-Amram, which operates in two phases: (1) abstract programs into "size-change graphs," and (2) check these graphs for the size-change property: the existence of paths that lead to infinite decreasing sequences. We transpose these two phases with an operational semantics that accounts for the run-time enforcement of the size-change property, postponing (or entirely avoiding) program abstraction. This choice has two key consequences: (1) size-change termination can be checked at run-time and (2) termination can be rephrased as a safety property analyzed using existing methods for systematic abstraction. We formulate run-time size-change checks as contracts in the style of Findler and Felleisen. The result compliments existing contracts that enforce partial correctness specifications to obtain contracts for total correctness. Our approach combines the robustness of the size-change principle for termination with the precise information available at run-time. It has tunable overhead and can check for nontermination without the conservativeness necessary in static checking. To obtain a sound and computable termination analysis, we apply existing abstract interpretation techniques directly to the operational semantics, avoiding the need for custom abstractions for termination. The resulting analyzer is competitive with with existing, purpose-built analyzers

Ten virtues of structured graphs

This paper extends the invited talk by the first author about the virtues of structured graphs. The motivation behind the talk and this paper relies on our experience on the development of ADR, a formal approach for the design of styleconformant, reconfigurable software systems. ADR is based on hierarchical graphs with interfaces and it has been conceived in the attempt of reconciling software architectures and process calculi by means of graphical methods. We have tried to write an ADR agnostic paper where we raise some drawbacks of flat, unstructured graphs for the design and analysis of software systems and we argue that hierarchical, structured graphs can alleviate such drawbacks

A formal support to business and architectural design for service-oriented systems

Architectural Design Rewriting (ADR) is an approach for the design of software architectures developed within Sensoria by reconciling graph transformation and process calculi techniques. The key feature that makes ADR a suitable and expressive framework is the algebraic handling of structured graphs, which improves the support for specification, analysis and verification of service-oriented architectures and applications. We show how ADR is used as a formal ground for high-level modelling languages and approaches developed within Sensoria