Improving the mesomorphic behaviour of supramolecular liquid crystals by resonance-assisted hydrogen bonding

A systematic structure-property relationship study on hydrogen-bonded liquid crystals was performed, revealing the impact of resonance-assisted hydrogen bonds (RAHBs) on the self-assembling behavior of the supramolecular architecture. The creation of a six-membered intramolecular hydrogen-bonded ring acts as a counterpart to the self-organization between hydrogen bond donators and acceptors and determines thus the suprastructure. Variation of the hydrogen-bonding pattern allowed us to significantly improve the temperature range of the reported liquid crystalline assemblies

An Improvement of the Piggyback Algorithm for Parallel Model Checking

This paper extends the piggyback algorithm to enlarge the set of liveness properties it can verify. Its extension is motivated by an attempt to express in logic the counterexamples it can detect and relate them to bounded liveness. The original algorithm is based on parallel breadth-first search and piggybacking of accepting states that are deleted after counting a fixed number of transitions. The main improvement is obtained by renewing the counter of transitions when the same accepting states are visited in the negated property automaton. In addition, we describe piggybacking of multiple states in either sets (exact) or Bloom filters (lossy but conservative), and use of local searches that attempt to connect cycles fragmented among processing cores. Finally it is proved that accepting cycle detection is in NC in the size of the product automaton's entire state space, including unreachable states

Naturally occurring polyphenols as building blocks for supramolecular liquid crystals-substitution pattern dominates mesomorphism

A modular supramolecular approach towards hydrogen-bonded liquid crystalline assemblies based on naturally occurring polyphenols is reported. The combination of experimental observations, crystallographic studies and semi-empirical analyses of the assemblies provides insight into the structure-property relationships of these materials. Here a direct correlation of the number of donor OH-groups as well as their orientation with the mesomorphic behavior is reported. We discovered that the number and orientation of the OH-groups have a stronger influence on the mesomorphic behavior of the supramolecular assemblies than the connectivity (e.g. stilbenoid or chalconoid) of the hydrogen bond donors. Furthermore, the photo-switching behavior of selected complexes containing azopyridine ligands was investigated. This study will help future scientists to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms and structure-property relationships of supramolecular assemblies with mesomorphic behavior, which is still one of the major challenges in current scienc

Omega-Regular Model Checking

peer reviewed"Regular model checking" is the name of a family of techniques for analyzing infinite-state systems in which states are represented by words or trees, sets of states by finite automata on these objects, and transitions by finite automata operating on pairs of state encodings, i.e. finite-state transducers. In this context, the central problem is then to compute the iterative closure of a finite-state transducer. This paper addresses the use of regular model-checking like techniques for systems whose states are represented by infinite (omega) words. Its main motivation is to show the feasibility and usefulness of this approach through a combination of the necessary theoretical developments, implementation, and experimentation. The iteration technique that is used is adapted from recent work of the authors on the iteration of finite-word transducers. It proceeds by comparing successive elements of a sequence of approximations of the iteration, detecting an "increment" that is added to move from one approximation to the next, and extrapolating the sequence by allowing arbitrary repetitions of this increment. By restricting oneself to weak deterministic Buchi automata, and using a number of implementation optimizations, examples of significant size can be handled. The proposed transducer iteration technique can just as well be exploited to compute the closure of a given set of states by the transducer iteration, which has proven to be a very effective way of using the technique. Examples such as a leaking gas burner in which time is modeled by real variables have been handled completely within the automata-theoretic setting

Two Variable vs. Linear Temporal Logic in Model Checking and Games

Model checking linear-time properties expressed in first-order logic has non-elementary complexity, and thus various restricted logical languages are employed. In this paper we consider two such restricted specification logics, linear temporal logic (LTL) and two-variable first-order logic (FO2). LTL is more expressive but FO2 can be more succinct, and hence it is not clear which should be easier to verify. We take a comprehensive look at the issue, giving a comparison of verification problems for FO2, LTL, and various sublogics thereof across a wide range of models. In particular, we look at unary temporal logic (UTL), a subset of LTL that is expressively equivalent to FO2; we also consider the stutter-free fragment of FO2, obtained by omitting the successor relation, and the expressively equivalent fragment of UTL, obtained by omitting the next and previous connectives. We give three logic-to-automata translations which can be used to give upper bounds for FO2 and UTL and various sublogics. We apply these to get new bounds for both non-deterministic systems (hierarchical and recursive state machines, games) and for probabilistic systems (Markov chains, recursive Markov chains, and Markov decision processes). We couple these with matching lower-bound arguments. Next, we look at combining FO2 verification techniques with those for LTL. We present here a language that subsumes both FO2 and LTL, and inherits the model checking properties of both languages. Our results give both a unified approach to understanding the behaviour of FO2 and LTL, along with a nearly comprehensive picture of the complexity of verification for these logics and their sublogics.Comment: 37 pages, to be published in Logical Methods in Computer Science journal, includes material presented in Concur 2011 and QEST 2012 extended abstract

Tableau-based decision procedures for logics of strategic ability in multi-agent systems

We develop an incremental tableau-based decision procedures for the Alternating-time temporal logic ATL and some of its variants. While running within the theoretically established complexity upper bound, we claim that our tableau is practically more efficient in the average case than other decision procedures for ATL known so far. Besides, the ease of its adaptation to variants of ATL demonstrates the flexibility of the proposed procedure.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Computational Logic. 48 page

Formal methods and tools for the development of distributed and real time systems : Esprit Project 3096 (SPEC)

The Basic Research Action No. 3096, Formal Methods snd Tools for the Development of Distributed and Real Time Systems, is funded in the Area of Computer Science, under the ESPRIT Programme of the European Community. The coordinating institution is the Department of Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, and the participating Institutions are the Institute of Computer Science of Crete. the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, the Programmimg Research Group of the University of Oxford, and the Computer Science Departments of the University of Manchester, Imperial College. Weizmann Institute of Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, IMAG Grenoble. Catholic University of Nijmegen, and the University of Liege. This document contains the synopsis. and part of the sections on objectives and area of advance, on baseline and rationale, on research goals, and on organisation of the action, as contained in the original proposal, submitted June, 198S. The section on the state of the art (18 pages) and the full list of references (21 pages) of the original proposal have been deleted because of limitation of available space

A theory of normed simulations

In existing simulation proof techniques, a single step in a lower-level specification may be simulated by an extended execution fragment in a higher-level one. As a result, it is cumbersome to mechanize these techniques using general purpose theorem provers. Moreover, it is undecidable whether a given relation is a simulation, even if tautology checking is decidable for the underlying specification logic. This paper introduces various types of normed simulations. In a normed simulation, each step in a lower-level specification can be simulated by at most one step in the higher-level one, for any related pair of states. In earlier work we demonstrated that normed simulations are quite useful as a vehicle for the formalization of refinement proofs via theorem provers. Here we show that normed simulations also have pleasant theoretical properties: (1) under some reasonable assumptions, it is decidable whether a given relation is a normed forward simulation, provided tautology checking is decidable for the underlying logic; (2) at the semantic level, normed forward and backward simulations together form a complete proof method for establishing behavior inclusion, provided that the higher-level specification has finite invisible nondeterminism.Comment: 31 pages, 10figure

Model Checking CTL is Almost Always Inherently Sequential

The model checking problem for CTL is known to be P-complete (Clarke, Emerson, and Sistla (1986), see Schnoebelen (2002)). We consider fragments of CTL obtained by restricting the use of temporal modalities or the use of negations---restrictions already studied for LTL by Sistla and Clarke (1985) and Markey (2004). For all these fragments, except for the trivial case without any temporal operator, we systematically prove model checking to be either inherently sequential (P-complete) or very efficiently parallelizable (LOGCFL-complete). For most fragments, however, model checking for CTL is already P-complete. Hence our results indicate that, in cases where the combined complexity is of relevance, approaching CTL model checking by parallelism cannot be expected to result in any significant speedup. We also completely determine the complexity of the model checking problem for all fragments of the extensions ECTL, CTL+, and ECTL+

Symmetry in temporal logic model checking

Temporal logic model checking involves checking the state-space of a model of a system to determine whether errors can occur in the system. Often this involves checking symmetrically equivalent areas of the state-space. The use of symmetry reduction to increase the efficiency of model checking has inspired a wealth of activity in the area of model checking research. We provide a survey of the associated literature