Safety verification of asynchronous pushdown systems with shaped stacks

In this paper, we study the program-point reachability problem of concurrent pushdown systems that communicate via unbounded and unordered message buffers. Our goal is to relax the common restriction that messages can only be retrieved by a pushdown process when its stack is empty. We use the notion of partially commutative context-free grammars to describe a new class of asynchronously communicating pushdown systems with a mild shape constraint on the stacks for which the program-point coverability problem remains decidable. Stacks that fit the shape constraint may reach arbitrary heights; further a process may execute any communication action (be it process creation, message send or retrieval) whether or not its stack is empty. This class extends previous computational models studied in the context of asynchronous programs, and enables the safety verification of a large class of message passing programs

A Graph-Based Semantics Workbench for Concurrent Asynchronous Programs

A number of novel programming languages and libraries have been proposed that offer simpler-to-use models of concurrency than threads. It is challenging, however, to devise execution models that successfully realise their abstractions without forfeiting performance or introducing unintended behaviours. This is exemplified by SCOOP---a concurrent object-oriented message-passing language---which has seen multiple semantics proposed and implemented over its evolution. We propose a "semantics workbench" with fully and semi-automatic tools for SCOOP, that can be used to analyse and compare programs with respect to different execution models. We demonstrate its use in checking the consistency of semantics by applying it to a set of representative programs, and highlighting a deadlock-related discrepancy between the principal execution models of the language. Our workbench is based on a modular and parameterisable graph transformation semantics implemented in the GROOVE tool. We discuss how graph transformations are leveraged to atomically model intricate language abstractions, and how the visual yet algebraic nature of the model can be used to ascertain soundness.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of FASE 2016 (to appear

Reachability of Communicating Timed Processes

We study the reachability problem for communicating timed processes, both in discrete and dense time. Our model comprises automata with local timing constraints communicating over unbounded FIFO channels. Each automaton can only access its set of local clocks; all clocks evolve at the same rate. Our main contribution is a complete characterization of decidable and undecidable communication topologies, for both discrete and dense time. We also obtain complexity results, by showing that communicating timed processes are at least as hard as Petri nets; in the discrete time, we also show equivalence with Petri nets. Our results follow from mutual topology-preserving reductions between timed automata and (untimed) counter automata.Comment: Extended versio

Coloured Modelling Spider Diagrams. Diagrams 2014

While Euler Diagrams (EDs) represent sets and their relationships, Coloured Euler Diagrams (CEDs [1]) additionally group sets into families, and sequences of CEDs enable the presentation of their dynamic evolution. Spider Diagrams (SDs) extend EDs, permitting the additional expression of elements, relationships between elements, and set membership, whilst Modelling Spider Diagrams (MSDs [2]) are used to specify the admissible states and evolutions of instances of types, enabling the verification of the conformance of configurations of instances with specifications. Transformations of MSDs generate evolutions of configurations in conformity with the specification of admissible sequences. We integrate CEDs and MSDs, proposing Coloured Modelling Spider Diagrams (CMSDs), in which underlying curves represent properties of a family of sets, whether this be state-based information or generic attributes of the domain elements and colours distinguish different families of curves. Examples of CMSDs from a visual case study of a car parking model are presented

ω-Petri nets

We introduce ω-Petri nets (ωPN), an extension of plain Petri nets with ω-labeled input and output arcs, that is well-suited to analyse parametric concurrent systems with dynamic thread creation. Most techniques (such as the Karp and Miller tree or the Rackoff technique) that have been proposed in the setting of plain Petri nets do not apply directly to ωPN because ωPN define transition systems that have infinite branching. This motivates a thorough analysis of the computational aspects of ωPN. We show that an ωPN can be turned into an plain Petri net that allows to recover the reachability set of the ωPN, but that does not preserve termination. This yields complexity bounds for the reachability, (place) boundedness and coverability problems on ωPN. We provide a practical algorithm to compute a coverability set of the ωPN and to decide termination by adapting the classical Karp and Miller tree construction. We also adapt the Rackoff technique to ωPN, to obtain the exact complexity of the termination problem. Finally, we consider the extension of ωPN with reset and transfer arcs, and show how this extension impacts the decidability and complexity of the aforementioned problems

Backward coverability with pruning for lossy channel systems

International audienc