14 research outputs found

    MATCOS-10

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    Model checking learning agent systems using Promela with embedded C code and abstraction

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    As autonomous systems become more prevalent, methods for their verification will become more widely used. Model checking is a formal verification technique that can help ensure the safety of autonomous systems, but in most cases it cannot be applied by novices, or in its straight \off-the-shelf" form. In order to be more widely applicable it is crucial that more sophisticated techniques are used, and are presented in a way that is reproducible by engineers and verifiers alike. In this paper we demonstrate in detail two techniques that are used to increase the power of model checking using the model checker SPIN. The first of these is the use of embedded C code within Promela specifications, in order to accurately re ect robot movement. The second is to use abstraction together with a simulation relation to allow us to verify multiple environments simultaneously. We apply these techniques to a fairly simple system in which a robot moves about a fixed circular environment and learns to avoid obstacles. The learning algorithm is inspired by the way that insects learn to avoid obstacles in response to pain signals received from their antennae. Crucially, we prove that our abstraction is sound for our example system { a step that is often omitted but is vital if formal verification is to be widely accepted as a useful and meaningful approach

    Model Checking and Model-Based Testing : Improving Their Feasibility by Lazy Techniques, Parallelization, and Other Optimizations

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    This thesis focuses on the lightweight formal method of model-based testing for checking safety properties, and derives a new and more feasible approach. For liveness properties, dynamic testing is impossible, so feasibility is increased by specializing on an important class of properties, livelock freedom, and deriving a more feasible model checking algorithm for it. All mentioned improvements are substantiated by experiments

    A linguistic approach to concurrent, distributed, and adaptive programming across heterogeneous platforms

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    Two major trends in computing hardware during the last decade have been an increase in the number of processing cores found in individual computer hardware platforms and an ubiquity of distributed, heterogeneous systems. Together, these changes can improve not only the performance of a range of applications, but the types of applications that can be created. Despite the advances in hardware technology, advances in programming of such systems has not kept pace. Traditional concurrent programming has always been challenging, and is only set to be come more so as the level of hardware concurrency increases. The different hardware platforms which make up heterogeneous systems come with domain-specific programming models, which are not designed to interact, or take into account the different resource-constraints present across different hardware devices, motivating a need for runtime reconfiguration or adaptation. This dissertation investigates the actor model of computation as an appropriate abstraction to address the issues present in programming concurrent, distributed, and adaptive applications across different scales and types of computing hardware. Given the limitations of other approaches, this dissertation describes a new actor-based programming language (Ensemble) and its runtime to address these challenges. The goal of this language is to enable non-specialist programmers to take advantage of parallel, distributed, and adaptive programming without the programmer requiring in-depth knowledge of hardware architectures or software frameworks. There is also a description of the design and implementation of the runtime system which executes Ensemble applications across a range of heterogeneous platforms. To show the suitability of the actor-based abstraction in creating applications for such systems, the language and runtime were evaluated in terms of linguistic complexity and performance. These evaluations covered programming embedded, concurrent, distributed, and adaptable applications, as well as combinations thereof. The results show that the actor provides an objectively simple way to program such systems without sacrificing performance

    Designing power aware wireless sensor networks leveraging software modeling techniques

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    Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically used to monitor specific phenomena and gather the data to a gateway node, where the data is further processed. WSNs nodes have limited power resources, which require developing power efficient systems. Additionally, reaching the nodes after a deployment to correct any design flaws is very challenging due the distributed nature of the nodes. The current development of WSNs occurs at the coding layer, which prevent the design from going through a typical software design process. Designing and analyzing the software modules of a WSN system at a higher abstraction layer than at the coding level will enable the designer of a WSN to fix any design errors and improve the system for power consumption at an early design stage, before the actual deployment of the network. This thesis presents multiple Unified Modeling Language (UML) design patterns that enable the designer to capture the structure and the behavior of the design of a WSN at higher abstraction layers. The UML models are developed based on these design patterns that are capable of early validation of the functional requirements and the power consumption of the system hardware resources by leveraging animation and instrumentation of the UML diagrams. To support the analysis of power consumption of the communication components of a WSN node, the Avrora network simulator was integrated with the UML design environment such that designer is able to analyze the power consumption analysis of the communication process at the UML layer. The UML and the Avrora simulation integration is achieved through developing a code generator that produces the necessary configuration for Avrora simulator and through parsing the simulator results. The methodology presented in this thesis is evaluated by demonstrating the power analysis of a typical collector system

    Succinct data structures for dynamics strings

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    A new simple algorithm for optimal embedding of complete binary trees into hypercubes as well as a node-by-node algorithm for embedding of nearly complete binary trees into hypercubes are presented

    Towards a Formal Framework for Mobile, Service-Oriented Sensor-Actuator Networks

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    Service-oriented sensor-actuator networks (SOSANETs) are deployed in health-critical applications like patient monitoring and have to fulfill strong safety requirements. However, a framework for the rigorous formal modeling and analysis of SOSANETs does not exist. In particular, there is currently no support for the verification of correct network behavior after node failure or loss/addition of communication links. To overcome this problem, we propose a formal framework for SOSANETs. The main idea is to base our framework on the \pi-calculus, a formally defined, compositional and well-established formalism. We choose KLAIM, an existing formal language based on the \pi-calculus as the foundation for our framework. With that, we are able to formally model SOSANETs with possible topology changes and network failures. This provides the basis for our future work on prediction, analysis and verification of the network behavior of these systems. Furthermore, we illustrate the real-life applicability of this approach by modeling and extending a use case scenario from the medical domain.Comment: In Proceedings FESCA 2013, arXiv:1302.478
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