30660022
Semantic Models for Distributed Object Reflection
A generic formal model of distributed object reflection is proposed, that combines logical reflection with a structuring of distributed objects as nested configurations of metaobject that can control subobjects under them. The model provides mathematical models for a good number of existing models of distributed reflection and of reflective middleware. To illustrate the ideas, we show in some detail how two important models of distributed actor reflection can be naturally obtained as special cases of our generic model, and discuss how several recent models of reflective middleware can be likewise formalized as instances of our model.
1787436
Proving termination of membership equational programs
Advanced typing, matching, and evaluation strategy features, as well as very general conditional rules, are routinely used in equational programming languages such as, for example, <sc>ASF+SDF</sc>, <sc>OBJ</sc>, <sc>CafeOBJ</sc>, <sc>Maude</sc>, and equational subsets of <sc>ELAN</sc> and <sc>CASL</sc>. Proving termination of equational programs having such expressive features is important but nontrivial, because some of those features may not be supported by standard termination methods and tools, such as <sc>muterm</sc>, <sc>C<i>i</i>ME</sc>, <sc>AProVE</sc>, <sc>TTT</sc>, <sc>Termptation</sc>, etc. Yet, use of the features may be essential to ensure termination. We present a sequence of theory transformations that can be used to bridge the gap between expressive equational programs and termination tools, prove the correctness of such transformations, and discuss a prototype tool performing the transformations on <sc>Maude</sc> equational programs and sending the resulting transformed theories to some of the aforementioned tools.
1438509
Algebraic Theories for Contextual Pre-nets
The algebraic models of computation for contextual nets that have been proposed in the literature either rely on a non-free monoid of objects, or introduce too many fictitious behaviors that must be somewhat filtered out. In this paper, we exploit partial membership equational logic to define a suitable theory of models, where the meaningful concurrent computations can be selected by means of membership predicates.
1049616
On the Semantics of Place/Transition Petri Nets
Placestransition (PT) Petri nets are one of the most widely used models of concurrency. However, they still lack, in our view, a satisfactory semantics: on the one hand the ‘token game’ is too intensional, even in its more abstract interpretations in terms of nonsequential processes and monoidal categories; on the other hand, Winskel's basic unfolding construction, which provides a coreflection between nets and finitary prime algebraic domains, works only for safe nets. In this paper we extend Winskel's result to PT nets. We start with a rather general category PTNets of PT nets, we introduce a category DecOcc of decorated (nondeterministic) occurrence nets and we define adjunctions between PTNets and DecOcc and between DecOcc and Occ, the category of occurrence nets. The role of DecOcc is to provide natural unfoldings for PT nets, i.e., acyclic safe nets where a notion of family is used to relate multiple instances of the same place. The unfolding functor from PTNets to Occ reduces to Winskel's when restricted to safe nets. Moreover, the standard coreflection between Occ and Dom, the category of finitary prime algebraic domains, when composed with the unfolding functor above, determines a chain of adjunctions between PTNets and Dom.
11646095
PMaude: Rewrite-based Specification Language for Probabilistic Object Systems
We introduce a rewrite-based specification language for modelling probabilistic concurrent and distributed systems. The language, based on PMaude, has both a rigorous formal basis and the characteristics of a high-level rule-based programming language. Furthermore, we provide tool support for performing discrete-event simulations of models written in PMaude, and for statistically analyzing various quantitative aspects of such models based on the samples that are generated through discrete-event simulation. Because distributed and concurrent communication protocols can be modelled using actors (concurrent objects with asynchronous message passing), we provide an actor PMaude module. The module aids writing specifications in a probabilistic actor formalism. This allows us to easily write specifications that are purely probabilistic - and not just non-deterministic. The absence of such (un-quantified) non-determinism in a probabilistic system is necessary for a form of statistical analysis that we also discuss. Specifically, we introduce a query language called Quantitative Temporal Expressions (or QuaTEx in short), to query various quantitative aspects of a probabilistic model. We also describe a statistical technique to evaluate QuaTEx expressions for a probabilistic model.
1768436
Modular Rewriting Semantics in Practice
We present a general method to achieve modularity of semantic definitions of programming languages specified as rewrite theories, so that semantic rules do not have to be redefined in language extensions. We illustrate the practical use of this method by means of two language case studies: two different semantics for CCS, and three different semantics for the GNU bc language.
27956868
Using Maude