Specification and analysis of SOC systems using COWS: a finance case study

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. We illustrate this approach by focussing on COWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We present the calculus and one of the analysis techniques it enables, that is based on the temporal logic SocL and the associated model checker CMC. We demonstrate applicability of our tools by means of a large case study, from the financial domain, which is first specified in COWS, and then analysed by using SocL to express many significant properties and CMC to verify them

Orchestrating Tuple-based Languages

The World Wide Web can be thought of as a global computing architecture supporting the deployment of distributed networked applications. Currently, such applications can be programmed by resorting mainly to two distinct paradigms: one devised for orchestrating distributed services, and the other designed for coordinating distributed (possibly mobile) agents. In this paper, the issue of designing a pro- gramming language aiming at reconciling orchestration and coordination is investigated. Taking as starting point the orchestration calculus Orc and the tuple-based coordination language Klaim, a new formalism is introduced combining concepts and primitives of the original calculi. To demonstrate feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, a prototype implementation of the new formalism is described and it is then used to tackle a case study dealing with a simplified but realistic electronic marketplace, where a number of on-line stores allow client applications to access information about their goods and to place orders

Service discovery and negotiation with COWS

To provide formal foundations to current (web) services technologies, we put forward using COWS, a process calculus for specifying, combining and analysing services, as a uniform formalism for modelling all the relevant phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, deployment and execution. In this paper, we show that constraints and operations on them can be smoothly incorporated in COWS, and propose a disciplined way to model multisets of constraints and to manipulate them through appropriate interaction protocols. Therefore, we demonstrate that also QoS requirement specifications and SLA achievements, and the phases of dynamic service discovery and negotiation can be comfortably modelled in COWS. We illustrate our approach through a scenario for a service-based web hosting provider

A Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore, many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent, reactive, and distributed systems. In this paper, we follow this approach and introduce CWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We show that CWS can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We illustrate the specification style that CWS supports by means of a large case study from the automotive domain and a number of more specific examples drawn from it

Batalin-Vilkovisky Integrals in Finite Dimensions

The Batalin-Vilkovisky method (BV) is the most powerful method to analyze functional integrals with (infinite-dimensional) gauge symmetries presently known. It has been invented to fix gauges associated with symmetries that do not close off-shell. Homological Perturbation Theory is introduced and used to develop the integration theory behind BV and to describe the BV quantization of a Lagrangian system with symmetries. Localization (illustrated in terms of Duistermaat-Heckman localization) as well as anomalous symmetries are discussed in the framework of BV.Comment: 35 page

Regulating Data Exchange in Service Oriented Applications

We define a type system for COWS, a formalism for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Our types permit to express policies constraining data exchanges in terms of sets of service partner names attachable to each single datum. Service programmers explicitly write only the annotations necessary to specify the wanted policies for communicable data, while a type inference system (statically) derives the minimal additional annotations that ensure consistency of services initial configuration. Then, the language dynamic semantics only performs very simple checks to authorize or block communication. We prove that the type system and the operational semantics are sound. As a consequence, we have the following data protection property: services always comply with the policies regulating the exchange of data among interacting services. We illustrate our approach through a simplified but realistic scenario for a service-based electronic marketplace

Glacier shrinkage will accelerate downstream decomposition of organic matter and alters microbiome structure and function.

peer reviewedThe shrinking of glaciers is among the most iconic consequences of climate change. Despite this, the downstream consequences for ecosystem processes and related microbiome structure and function remain poorly understood. Here, using a space-for-time substitution approach across 101 glacier-fed streams (GFSs) from six major regions worldwide, we investigated how glacier shrinkage is likely to impact the organic matter (OM) decomposition rates of benthic biofilms. To do this, we measured the activities of five common extracellular enzymes and estimated decomposition rates by using enzyme allocation equations based on stoichiometry. We found decomposition rates to average 0.0129 (% d-1 ), and that decreases in glacier influence (estimated by percent glacier catchment coverage, turbidity, and a glacier index) accelerates decomposition rates. To explore mechanisms behind these relationships, we further compared decomposition rates with biofilm and stream water characteristics. We found that chlorophyll-a, temperature, and stream water N:P together explained 61% of the variability in decomposition. Algal biomass, which is also increasing with glacier shrinkage, showed a particularly strong relationship with decomposition, likely indicating their importance in contributing labile organic compounds to these carbon-poor habitats. We also found high relative abundances of chytrid fungi in GFS sediments, which putatively parasitize these algae, promoting decomposition through a fungal shunt. Exploring the biofilm microbiome, we then sought to identify bacterial phylogenetic clades significantly associated with decomposition, and found numerous positively (e.g., Saprospiraceae) and negatively (e.g., Nitrospira) related clades. Lastly, using metagenomics, we found evidence of different bacterial classes possessing different proportions of EEA-encoding genes, potentially informing some of the microbial associations with decomposition rates. Our results, therefore, present new mechanistic insights into OM decomposition in GFSs by demonstrating that an algal-based "green food web" is likely to increase in importance in the future and will promote important biogeochemical shifts in these streams as glaciers vanish

On the Relative Expressive Power of Asynchronous Communication Primitives

In this paper, we study eight asynchronous communication primitives, arising from the combination of three features: arity (monadic vs polyadic data), communication medium (message passing vs shared dataspaces) and pattern-matching. Each primitive has been already used in at least one language appeared in literature; however, to uniformly reason on such primitives, we plugged them in a common framework inspired by the asynchronous-calculus. By means of possibility/impossibility of ‘reasonable ’ encodings, we compare every pair of primitives to obtain a hierarchy of languages based on their relative expressive power.