Input-output Conformance Testing for Channel-based Service Connectors

Service-based systems are software systems composed of autonomous components or services provided by different vendors, deployed on remote machines and accessible through the web. One of the challenges of modern software engineering is to ensure that such a system behaves as intended by its designer. The Reo coordination language is an extensible notation for formal modeling and execution of service compositions. Services that have no prior knowledge about each other communicate through advanced channel connectors which guarantee that each participant, service or client, receives the right data at the right time. Each channel is a binary relation that imposes synchronization and data constraints on input and output messages. Furthermore, channels are composed together to realize arbitrarily complex behavioral protocols. During this process, a designer may introduce errors into the connector model or the code for their execution, and thus affect the behavior of a composed service. In this paper, we present an approach for model-based testing of coordination protocols designed in Reo. Our approach is based on the input-output conformance (ioco) testing theory and exploits the mapping of automata-based semantic models for Reo to equivalent process algebra specifications

Modeling and Simulation of Selected Operational IT Risks in the Banking Sector (Extended Version)

International banks need to estimate their operational risks due to external regulations. Based on their estimations they need to provide private capital to cover potential losses caused by these risks. Therefore, operational risks need to be properly measured and managed in order to reduce the required private capital. In this paper we discuss operational risks related to a typical banking business process that is enabled by an IT landscape. We present how risks related to the operational behavior of the IT landscape can be simulated. The simulation results help to estimate risk measures like the expected loss, the value-at-risk and the expected shortfall. We further sketch how co

Taming hierarchical connectors

Building and maintaining complex systems requires good software engineering practices, including code modularity and reuse. The same applies in the context of coordination of complex component-based systems. This paper investigates how to verify properties of complex coordination patterns built hierarchically, i.e., built from composing blocks that are in turn built from smaller blocks. Most existing approaches to verify properties flatten these hierarchical models before the verification process, losing the hierarchical structure. We propose an approach to verify hierarchical models using containers as actions; more concretely, containers interacting with their neighbours. We present a dynamic modal logic tailored for hierarchical connectors, using Reo and Petri Nets to illustrate our approach. We realise our approach via a prototype implementation available online to verify hierarchical Reo connectors, encoding connectors and formulas into mCRL2 specifications and formulas.publishe

Reo + mCRL2: A Framework for Model-checking Dataflow in Service Compositions

The paradigm of service-oriented computing revolutionized the field of software engineering. According to this paradigm, new systems are composed of existing stand-alone services to support complex cross-organizational business processes. Correct communication of these services is not possible without a proper coordination mechanism. The Reo coordination language is a channel-based modeling language that introduces various types of channels and their composition rules. By composing Reo channels, one can specify Reo connectors that realize arbitrary complex behavioral protocols. Several formalisms have been introduced to give semantics to Reo. In their most basic form, they reflect service synchronization and dataflow constraints imposed by connectors. To ensure that the composed system behaves as intended, we need a wide range of automated verification tools to assist service composition designers. In this paper, we present our framework for the verification of Reo using the toolset. We unify our previous work on mapping various semantic models for Reo, namely, constraint automata, timed constraint automata, coloring semantics and the newly developed action constraint automata, to the process algebraic specification language of , address the correctness of this mapping, discuss tool support, and present a detailed example that illustrates the use of Reo empowered with for the analysis of dataflow in service-based process models

Reo + mCRL2: A Framework for Model-Checking Dataflow in Service Compositions

The paradigm of service-oriented computing revolutionized the field of software engineering. According to this paradigm, new systems are composed of existing stand-alone services to support complex cross-organizational business processes. Correct communication of these services is not possible without a proper coordination mechanism. The Reo coordination language is a channel-based modeling language that introduces various types of channels and their composition rules. By composing Reo channels, one can specify Reo connectors that realize arbitrary complex behavioral protocols. Several formalisms have been introduced to give semantics to Reo. In their most basic form, they reflect service synchronization and dataflow constraints imposed by connectors. To ensure that the composed system behaves as intended, we need a wide range of automated verification tools to assist service composition designers. In this paper, we present our framework for the verification of Reo using the mCRL2 toolset. We unify our previous work on mapping various semantic models for Reo, namely, constraint automata, timed constraint automata, coloring semantics and the newly developed action constraint automata, to the process algebraic specification language of mCRL2, address the correctness of this mapping, discuss tool support, and present a detailed example that illustrates the use of Reo empowered with mCRL2 for the analysis of dataflow in service-based process models

Requirements for the formal representation of pathophysiology mechanisms by clinicians

Knowledge of multiscale mechanisms in pathophysiology is the bedrock of clinical practice. If quantitative methods, predicting patient-specific behaviour of these pathophysiology mechanisms, are to be brought to bear on clinical decision-making, the Human Physiome community and Clinical community must share a common computational blueprint for pathophysiology mechanisms. A number of obstacles stand in the way of this sharing—not least the technical and operational challenges that must be overcome to ensure that (i) the explicit biological meanings of the Physiome's quantitative methods to represent mechanisms are open to articulation, verification and study by clinicians, and that (ii) clinicians are given the tools and training to explicitly express disease manifestations in direct contribution to modelling. To this end, the Physiome and Clinical communities must co-develop a common computational toolkit, based on this blueprint, to bridge the representation of knowledge of pathophysiology mechanisms (a) that is implicitly depicted in electronic health records and the literature, with (b) that found in mathematical models explicitly describing mechanisms. In particular, this paper makes use of a step-wise description of a specific disease mechanism as a means to elicit the requirements of representing pathophysiological meaning explicitly. The computational blueprint developed from these requirements addresses the Clinical community goals to (i) organize and manage healthcare resources in terms of relevant disease-related knowledge of mechanisms and (ii) train the next generation of physicians in the application of quantitative methods relevant to their research and practice

A note on reactive transitions and Reo connectors

The structure of a reactive transition system can to be modi ed on the y by e.g. removing, reversing or adding new transitions. The topic has been studied by D. Gabbay and his collaborators in di erent contexts. In this paper we take their work a step further, introducing a suitable notion of bisimulation and obtaining a Hennessy-Milner theorem with respect to a hybrid logic in which transition properties can be expressed. Our motivation is to provide a characterisation of equivalence for such systems in order to exploit their possible roles in the formal description of software connectors in Reo, either from a behavioural (semantic) or spatial (syntactic) point of view.“SmartEGOV/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037”, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (EFDR). Additional support was provided by the European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UID/MAT/04106/2013 at CIDMA. The first author is also supported by an Individual Doctoral Grant (reference number PD/BD/114186/2016

Acidosis and Deafness in Patients with Recessive Mutations in FOXI1

Maintenance of the composition of inner ear fluid and regulation of electrolytes and acid-base homeostasis in the collecting duct system of the kidney require an overlapping set of membrane transport proteins regulated by the forkhead transcription factor FOXI1. In two unrelated consanguineous families, we identified three patients with novel homozygous missense mutations in FOXI1 (p.L146F and p.R213P) predicted to affect the highly conserved DNA binding domain. Patients presented with early-onset sensorineural deafness and distal renal tubular acidosis. In cultured cells, the mutations reduced the DNA binding affinity of FOXI1, which hence, failed to adequately activate genes crucial for normal inner ear function and acidbase regulation in the kidney. A substantial proportion of patients with a clinical diagnosis of inherited distal renal tubular acidosis has no identified causative mutations in currently known disease genes. Our data suggest that recessive mutations in FOXI1 can explain the disease in a subset of these patients