Revisiting Semantics of Interactions for Trace Validity Analysis

Interaction languages such as MSC are often associated with formal semantics by means of translations into distinct behavioral formalisms such as automatas or Petri nets. In contrast to translational approaches we propose an operational approach. Its principle is to identify which elementary communication actions can be immediately executed, and then to compute, for every such action, a new interaction representing the possible continuations to its execution. We also define an algorithm for checking the validity of execution traces (i.e. whether or not they belong to an interaction's semantics). Algorithms for semantic computation and trace validity are analyzed by means of experiments.Comment: 18 pages of contents and 2 pages for references, 10 figures. Published in ETAPS-FASE2020 : "23rd International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering" in the "research papers" categor

Testing the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive systems

Self-Adaptive systems are software-intensive systems endowed with the ability to respond to a variety of changes that may occur in their environment, goals, or the system itself, by adapting their structure and behavior at run-time in an autonomous way. Controllers are complex components incorporated in self-adaptive systems, which are crucial to their function since they are in charge of adapting the target system by executing actions through effectors, based on information monitored by probes. However, although controllers are becoming critical in many application domains, so far very little has been done to assess their robustness. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive software systems, aiming to identify faults in their design. Our proposal considers the stateful nature of the controller, and identifies a set of robustness tests, which includes the provision of mutated inputs to the interfaces between the controller and the target system (i.e., probes). The feasibility of the approach is evaluated on Rainbow, a framework for architecture-based self-adaptation, and in the context of the Znn.com case study

First Molecules, Biological Chirality, Origin(s) of Life

Origin(s) of biological chirality appear(s) to be intimately connected to origin(s) of life. Prebiotic evolution toward these important turning points can be traced back to single chiral molecules. These can be small (monomeric) units as amino acids or monosaccharides or oligomers as oligo-RNA type molecules. Earlier speculations about these two kinds of entries to biological chirality are critically reviewe

Generalization possibilities of autocatalytic absolute enantioselective synthesis

A simple empirical formula enables the quantitative description of chiral autocatalysis. This formula was used for the prediction of the number of consecutive autocatalytic reaction cycles needed to obtain a high enantiomeric excess without chiral auxiliary or an asymmetric physical field (absolute enantioselective synthesis). The results show, that even less selective Soai-type systems can be used for absolute enantioselective synthesis, which, therefore, appears to be a fairly general phenomenon. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd

A toolset for mobile systems testing

International audienceValidation of mobile applications needs taking account of context (such network topology) and interactions between mobile nodes. Scenario-based approaches are well-suited to describe the behavior and interactions to observe in distributed systems. The difficulty to control accurately the execution context of such applications has led us to use passive testing. This paper presents a toolset which supports specification and verification of scenarios. A UML-based formal language, called TERMOS, has been implemented for specifying scenarios in mobile computing systems. These scenarios capture the key properties which are automatically checked on the traces, considering both the spatial configuration of nodes and their communication. We give an overview of the language design choices, its semantics and the implementation of the tool chain. The approach is demonstrated on a case study