Transition system specifications with negative premises

AbstractIn this article the general approach to Plotkin-style operational semantics of Groote and Vaandrager (1989) is extended to transition system specifications (TSSs) with rules that may contain negative premises. Two problems arise: firstly the rules may be inconsistent, and secondly it is not obvious how a TSS determines a transition relation. We present a general method, based on the stratification technique in logic programming, to prove consistency of a set of rules and we show how a specific transition relation can be associated with a TSS in a natural way. Then a special format for the rules, the ntyft/ntyxt format, is defined. It is shown that for this format three important theorems hold. The first theorem says that bisimulation is a congruence if all operators are defined using this format. The second theorem states that, under certain restrictions, a TSS in ntyft format can be added conservatively to a TSS in pure ntyft/ntyxt format. Finally, it is shown that the trace congruence for image-finite processes induced by the pure ntyft/ntyxt format is precisely bisimulation equivalence

Operational Semantics of Process Monitors

CSPe is a specification language for runtime monitors that can directly express concurrency in a bottom-up manner that composes the system from simpler, interacting components. It includes constructs to explicitly flag failures to the monitor, which unlike deadlocks and livelocks in conventional process algebras, propagate globally and aborts the whole system's execution. Although CSPe has a trace semantics along with an implementation demonstrating acceptable performance, it lacks an operational semantics. An operational semantics is not only more accessible than trace semantics but also indispensable for ensuring the correctness of the implementation. Furthermore, a process algebra like CSPe admits multiple denotational semantics appropriate for different purposes, and an operational semantics is the basis for justifying such semantics' integrity and relevance. In this paper, we develop an SOS-style operational semantics for CSPe, which properly accounts for explicit failures and will serve as a basis for further study of its properties, its optimization, and its use in runtime verification

Lean and Full Congruence Formats for Recursion

In this paper I distinguish two (pre)congruence requirements for semantic equivalences and preorders on processes given as closed terms in a system description language with a recursion construct. A lean congruence preserves equivalence when replacing closed subexpressions of a process by equivalent alternatives. A full congruence moreover allows replacement within a recursive specification of subexpressions that may contain recursion variables bound outside of these subexpressions. I establish that bisimilarity is a lean (pre)congruence for recursion for all languages with a structural operational semantics in the ntyft/ntyxt format. Additionally, it is a full congruence for the tyft/tyxt format.Comment: To appear in: Proc. LICS'17, Reykjavik, Iceland, IEE

Causality in the Semantics of Esterel: Revisited

We re-examine the challenges concerning causality in the semantics of Esterel and show that they pertain to the known issues in the semantics of Structured Operational Semantics with negative premises. We show that the solutions offered for the semantics of SOS also provide answers to the semantic challenges of Esterel and that they satisfy the intuitive requirements set by the language designers

Pushdown Automata and Context-Free Grammars in Bisimulation Semantics

The Turing machine models an old-fashioned computer, that does not interact with the user or with other computers, and only does batch processing. Therefore, we came up with a Reactive Turing Machine that does not have these shortcomings. In the Reactive Turing Machine, transitions have labels to give a notion of interactivity. In the resulting process graph, we use bisimilarity instead of language equivalence. Subsequently, we considered other classical theorems and notions from automata theory and formal languages theory. In this paper, we consider the classical theorem of the correspondence between pushdown automata and context-free grammars. By changing the process operator of sequential composition to a sequencing operator with intermediate acceptance, we get a better correspondence in our setting. We find that the missing ingredient to recover the full correspondence is the addition of a notion of state awareness

Parallel Pushdown Automata and Commutative Context-Free Grammars in Bisimulation Semantics (Extended Abstract)

A classical theorem states that the set of languages given by a pushdown automaton coincides with the set of languages given by a context-free grammar. In previous work, we proved the pendant of this theorem in a setting with interaction: the set of processes given by a pushdown automaton coincides with the set of processes given by a finite guarded recursive specification over a process algebra with actions, choice, sequencing and guarded recursion, if and only if we add sequential value passing. In this paper, we look what happens if we consider parallel pushdown automata instead of pushdown automata, and a process algebra with parallelism instead of sequencing.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS2023, arXiv:2309.05788. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.0171

Rooted branching bisimulation as a congruence for probabilistic transition systems

Ponencia presentada en el 13 International Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages and Systems. London, United Kingdom, April 11-12, 2015.We propose a probabilistic transition system specification format, referred to as probabilistic RBB safe, for which rooted branching bisimulation is a congruence. The congruence theorem is based on the approach of Fokkink for the qualitative case. For this to work, the theory of transition system specifications in the setting of labeled transition systems needs to be extended to deal with probability distributions, both syntactically and semantically. We provide a scheduler-free characterization of probabilistic branching bisimulation as adapted from work of Andova et al. for the alternating model. Counter examples are given to justify the various conditions required by the format.Fil: Lee, Matías David. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: De Vink, Erik P. Eindhoven University of Technology; The Netherlands.Fil: De Vink, Erik P. Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica; The Netherlands.Ciencias de la Computació