arXiv subjects

José Proença

Publications and source records attributed to José Proença.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Overview and Roadmap of Team Automata

Team Automata is a formalism for interacting component-based systems proposed in 1997, whereby multiple sending and receiving actions from concurrent automata can synchronise. During the past 25+ years, team automata have been studied and applied in many different contexts, involving 25+ researchers and resulting in 25+ publications. In this paper, we first revisit the specific notion of synchronisation and composition of team automata, relating it to other relevant coordination models, such as Reo, BIP, Contract Automata, Choreography Automata, and Multi-Party Session Types. We then identify several aspects that have recently been investigated for team automata and related models. These include communication properties (which are the properties of interest?), realisability (how to decompose a global model into local components?), tool support (what has been automatised or implemented?), and variability (can a family of concrete product (automata) models be captured concisely?). Our presentation of these aspects provides a snapshot of the most recent trends in research on team automata, and delineates a roadmap for future research, both for team automata and for related formalisms.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

Analyzing Many Simulations of Hybrid Programs in Lince

Hybrid systems are increasingly used in critical applications such as medical devices, infrastructure systems, and autonomous vehicles. Lince is an academic tool for specifying and simulating such systems using a C-like language with differential equations. This paper presents recent experiments that enhance Lince with mechanisms for executing multiple simulation variants and generating histograms that quantify the frequency with which a given property holds. We illustrate our extended Lince using variations of an adaptive cruise control system.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2025

CoMPSeT: A Framework for Comparing Multiparty Session Types

Concurrent systems are often complex and difficult to design. Choreographic languages, such as Multiparty Session Types (MPST), allow the description of global protocols of interactions by capturing valid patterns of interactions between participants. Many variations of MPST exist, each one with its rather specific features and idiosyncrasies. Here we propose a tool (CoMPSeT) that provides clearer insights over different features in existing MPST. We select a representative set of MPST examples and provide mechanisms to combine different features and to animate and compare the semantics of concrete examples. CoMPSeT is open-source, compiled into JavaScript, and can be directly executed from any browser, becoming useful both for researchers who want to better understand the landscape of MPST and for teachers who want to explain global choreographies.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2025

An Adequate While-Language for Stochastic Hybrid Computation

We introduce a language for formally reasoning about programs that combine differential constructs with probabilistic ones. The language harbours, for example, such systems as adaptive cruise controllers, continuous-time random walks, and physical processes involving multiple collisions, like in Einstein's Brownian motion. We furnish the language with an operational semantics and use it to implement a corresponding interpreter. We also present a complementary, denotational semantics and establish an adequacy theorem between both cases.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2024

Formal Simulation and Visualisation of Hybrid Programs

The design and analysis of systems that combine computational behaviour with physical processes' continuous dynamics - such as movement, velocity, and voltage - is a famous, challenging task. Several theoretical results from programming theory emerged in the last decades to tackle the issue; some of which are the basis of a proof-of-concept tool, called Lince, that aids in the analysis of such systems, by presenting simulations of their respective behaviours. However being a proof-of-concept, the tool is quite limited with respect to usability, and when attempting to apply it to a set of common, concrete problems, involving autonomous driving and others, it either simply cannot simulate them or fails to provide a satisfactory user-experience. The current work complements the aforementioned theoretical approaches with a more practical perspective, by improving Lince along several dimensions: to name a few, richer syntactic constructs, more operations, more informative plotting systems and errors messages, and a better performance overall. We illustrate our improvements via a variety of examples that involve both autonomous driving and electrical systems.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Reactive graphs in action (extended version)

Reactive graphs are transition structures whereas edges become active and inactive during its evolution, that were introduced by Dov Gabbay from a mathematical's perspective. This paper presents Marge (https://fm-dcc.github.io/MARGe), a web-based tool to visualise and analyse reactive graphs enriched with labels. Marge animates the operational semantics of reactive graphs and offers different graphical views to provide insights over concrete systems. We motivate the applicability of reactive graphs for adaptive systems and for featured transition systems, using Marge to tighten the gap between the existing theoretical models and their usage to analyse concrete systems.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2023

Spreadsheet-based Configuration of Families of Real-Time Specifications

Model checking real-time systems is complex, and requires a careful trade-off between including enough detail to be useful and not too much detail to avoid state explosion. This work exploits variability of the formal model being analysed and the requirements being checked, to facilitate the model-checking of variations of real-time specifications. This work results from the collaboration between academics and Alstom, a railway company with a concrete use-case, in the context of the VALU3S European project. The configuration of the variability of the formal specifications is described in MS Excel spreadsheets with a particular structure, making it easy to use also by developers. These spreadsheets are processed automatically by our prototype tool that generates instances and runs the model checker. We propose the extension of our previous work by exploiting analysis over valid combination of features, while preserving the simplicity of a spreadsheet-based interface with the model checker.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Caos: A Reusable Scala Web Animator of Operational Semantics (Extended With Hands-On Tutorial)

This tool paper presents Caos: a methodology and a programming framework for computer-aided design of structural operational semantics for formal models. This framework includes a set of Scala libraries and a workflow to produce visual and interactive diagrams that animate and provide insights over the structure and the semantics of a given abstract model with operational rules. Caos follows an approach in which theoretical foundations and a practical tool are built together, as an alternative to foundations-first design ("tool justifies theory") or tool-first design ("foundations justify practice"). The advantage of Caos is that the tool-under-development can immediately be used to automatically run numerous and sizeable examples in order to identify subtle mistakes, unexpected outcomes, and unforeseen limitations in the foundations-under-development, as early as possible. We share two success stories of Caos' methodology and framework in our own teaching and research context, where we analyse a simple while-language and a choreographic language, including their operational rules and the concurrent composition of such rules. We further discuss how others can include Caos in their own analysis and Scala tools.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2022

Branching Pomsets for Choreographies

Choreographic languages describe possible sequences of interactions among a set of agents. Typical models are based on languages or automata over sending and receiving actions. Pomsets provide a more compact alternative by using a partial order over these actions and by not making explicit the possible interleaving of concurrent actions. However, pomsets offer no compact representation of choices. For example, if an agent Alice can send one of two possible messages to Bob three times, one would need a set of 2 * 2 * 2 distinct pomsets to represent all possible branches of Alice's behaviour. This paper proposes an extension of pomsets, named branching pomsets, with a branching structure that can represent Alice's behaviour using 2 + 2 + 2 ordered actions. We encode choreographies as branching pomsets and show that the pomset semantics of the encoded choreographies are bisimilar to their operational semantics.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2021

Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Formal Integrated Development Environment

This volume contains the proceedings of F-IDE 2021, the sixth international workshop on Formal Integrated Development Environment, which was held online on May 24-25, 2021, as part of NFM'21, the 13th NASA Formal Methods Symposium. High levels of safety, security and privacy standards require the use of formal methods to specify and develop compliant software (sub)systems. Any standard comes with an assessment process, which requires a complete documentation of the application in order to ease the justification of design choices and the review of code and proofs. Thus tools are needed for handling specifications, program constructs and verification artifacts. The aim of the F-IDE workshop is to provide a forum for presenting and discussing research efforts as well as experience returns on design, development and usage of formal IDE aiming at making formal methods more accessible for both specialists and non-specialists.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Featured Team Automata

We propose featured team automata to support variability in the development and analysis of teams, which are systems of reactive components that communicate according to specified synchronisation types. A featured team automaton concisely describes a family of concrete product models for specific configurations determined by feature selection. We focus on the analysis of communication-safety properties, but doing so product-wise quickly becomes impractical. Therefore, we investigate how to lift notions of receptiveness (no message loss) to the level of family models. We show that featured (weak) receptiveness of featured team automata characterises (weak) receptiveness for all product instantiations. A prototypical tool supports the developed theory.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2020

Implementing Hybrid Semantics: From Functional to Imperative

Hybrid programs combine digital control with differential equations, and naturally appear in a wide range of application domains, from biology and control theory to real-time software engineering. The entanglement of discrete and continuous behaviour inherent to such programs goes beyond the established computer science foundations, producing challenges related to e.g. infinite iteration and combination of hybrid behaviour with other effects. A systematic treatment of hybridness as a dedicated computational effect has emerged recently. In particular, a generic idealized functional language HybCore with a sound and adequate operational semantics has been proposed. The latter semantics however did not provide hints to implementing HybCore as a runnable language, suitable for hybrid system simulation (e.g. the semantics features rules with uncountably many premises). We introduce an imperative counterpart of HybCore, whose semantics is simpler and runnable, and yet intimately related with the semantics of HybCore at the level of hybrid monads. We then establish a corresponding soundness and adequacy theorem. To attest that the resulting semantics can serve as a firm basis for the implementation of typical tools of programming oriented to the hybrid domain, we present a web-based prototype implementation to evaluate and inspect hybrid programs, in the spirit of GHCi for Haskell and UTop for OCaml. The major asset of our implementation is that it formally follows the operational semantic rules.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2015

Proceedings 14th International Workshop on Foundations of Coordination Languages and Self-Adaptive Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of FOCLASA 2015, the 14th International Workshop on the Foundations of Coordination Languages and Self-Adaptive Systems. FOCLASA 2015 was held in Madrid, Spain, on September 5, 2015 as a satellite event of CONCUR 2015, the 26th International Conference on Concurrency Theory. Modern software systems are distributed, concurrent, mobile, and often involve composition of heterogeneous components and stand-alone services. Service coordination and self-adaptation constitute the core characteristics of distributed and service-oriented systems. Coordination languages and formal approaches to modelling and reasoning about self-adaptive behaviour help to simplify the development of complex distributed service-based systems, enable functional correctness proofs, automated synthesis of correct-by-construction systems, and improve reusability and maintainability of such systems. The goal of the FOCLASA workshop is to put together researchers and practitioners of the aforementioned fields, to share and identify common problems, and to devise general solutions in the context of coordination languages and self-adaptive systems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2015

Proceedings 13th International Workshop on Foundations of Coordination Languages and Self-Adaptive Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of FOCLASA 2014, the 13th International Workshop on the Foundations of Coordination Languages and Self-Adaptive Systems. FOCLASA 2014 was held in Rome, Italy, on September 9, 2014 as a satellite event of CONCUR 2014, the 25th International Conference on Concurrency Theory. Modern software systems are distributed, concurrent, mobile, and often involve composition of heterogeneous components and stand-alone services. Service coordination and self-adaptation constitute the core characteristics of distributed and service-oriented systems. Coordination languages and formal approaches to modelling and reasoning about self-adaptive behaviour help to simplify the development of complex distributed service-based systems, enable functional correctness proofs and improve reusability and maintainability of such systems. The goal of the FOCLASA workshop is to put together researchers and practitioners of the aforementioned fields, to share and identify common problems, and to devise general solutions in the context of coordination languages and self-adaptive systems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2012

A Procedure for Splitting Processes and its Application to Coordination

We present a procedure for splitting processes in a process algebra with multi-actions (a subset of the specification language mCRL2). This splitting procedure cuts a process into two processes along a set of actions A: roughly, one of these processes contains no actions from A, while the other process contains only actions from A. We state and prove a theorem asserting that the parallel composition of these two processes equals the original process under appropriate synchronization. We apply our splitting procedure to the process algebraic semantics of the coordination language Reo: using this procedure and its related theorem, we formally establish the soundness of splitting Reo connectors along the boundaries of their (a)synchronous regions in implementations of Reo. Such splitting can significantly improve the performance of connectors.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2011

Decoupled execution of synchronous coordination models via behavioural automata

Synchronous coordination systems allow the exchange of data by logically indivisible actions involving all coordinated entities. This paper introduces behavioural automata, a logically synchronous coordination model based on the Reo coordination language, which focuses on relevant aspects for the concurrent evolution of these systems. We show how our automata model encodes the Reo and Linda coordination models and how it introduces an explicit predicate that captures the concurrent evolution, distinguishing local from global actions, and lifting the need of most synchronous models to involve all entities at each coordination step, paving the way to more scalable implementations.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2009

Coordination via Interaction Constraints I: Local Logic

Wegner describes coordination as constrained interaction. We take this approach literally and define a coordination model based on interaction constraints and partial, iterative and interactive constraint satisfaction. Our model captures behaviour described in terms of synchronisation and data flow constraints, plus various modes of interaction with the outside world provided by external constraint symbols, on-the-fly constraint generation, and coordination variables. Underlying our approach is an engine performing (partial) constraint satisfaction of the sets of constraints. Our model extends previous work on three counts: firstly, a more advanced notion of external interaction is offered; secondly, our approach enables local satisfaction of constraints with appropriate partial solutions, avoiding global synchronisation over the entire constraints set; and, as a consequence, constraint satisfaction can finally occur concurrently, and multiple parts of a set of constraints can be solved and interact with the outside world in an asynchronous manner, unless synchronisation is required by the constraints. This paper describes the underlying logic, which enables a notion of local solution, and relates this logic to the more global approach of our previous work based on classical logic.

cs.LO↗