On the needs for specification and verification of collaborative and concurrent robots, agents and processes

This report summarises and integrates two different tracks of research for the purpose of envisioning and preparing a joint research project proposal. Soft- and hardware systems have become increasingly complex and act "concurrently", both with respect to memory access (i.e. information flow) and computational resources (i.e. "services"). The software development metaphor of cloud-storage, cloud-computing and service-oriented design has been anticipated by artificial intelligence (AI) research at least 30 years ago (parallel and distributed computation already dates back to the 1950’s and 1970s). What is known as a "service" today is what in AI is known as the capability of an agent; and the problem of information flow and consistency has been a headstone of information processing ever since. Based on a real-world robotics application we demonstrate how an increasingly abstract description of collaborating or competing agents correspond to a set of concurrent processes. In the second part we review several approaches to the theory of concurrent systems. Based on the different kinds of program semantics we present corresponding logical and algebraic means for the description of parallel processes and memory access. It turns out that Concurrent Kleene Algebra (CKA) and its related graphlet metaphor appears to deliver a one-to-one matching formal description of the module structures developed in the first part. The problem of snapshotting system states in order to receive (partial) traces of a running system seems to be well describable by a Temporal Logic of Actions (TLA). Finally, the different types of subsystems and their mutual requirements such as exclusiveness etc. seem to be best describable in a separation-logic like approach. We conclude with a list of research questions detailing some of the many promising issues raised in the report

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 31st European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2022, which was held during April 5-7, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 21 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. They deal with fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 31st European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2022, which was held during April 5-7, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 21 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. They deal with fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems

Towards Interactive Verification of Programmable Logic Controllers using Modal Kleene Algebra and KIV

In this paper we develop an approach to interactive verification of programmable logic controllers which often serve as controllers in safety critical systems and hence need thorough verification. As a verification tool we use the KIV system, whereas the formalization is done in modal Kleene algebra. We first prove a bunch of theorems from modal Kleene algebra in KIV, subsequently translate the desired properties of a program for a programmable logic controller in modal Kleene algebra, and finally prove these encoded properties interactively with KIV

Towards Interactive Verification of Programmable Logic Controllers using Modal Kleene Algebra and KIV

This talk introduces an approach to interactive verification of programmable logic controllers which often serve as controllers in safety critical systems and hence need thorough verification. It gives first a short introduction to programmable logic controllers, afterwards an introduction to the framework of modal Kleene Algebra and a short view of the interactive proving system KIV. Finally, it is shown how Kleene Algebra can be used to verify LTL properties of programmable logic controllers using the KIV system