Michele Loreti

SCC: a service centered calculus

We seek for a small set of primitives that might serve as a basis for formalising and programming service oriented applications over global computers. As an outcome of this study we introduce here SCC, a process calculus that features explicit notions of service definition, service invocation and session handling. Our proposal has been influenced by Orc, a programming model for structured orchestration of services, but the SCCs session handling mechanism allows for the definition of structured interaction protocols, more complex than the basic request-response provided by Orc. We present syntax and operational semantics of SCC and a number of simple but nontrivial programming examples that demonstrate flexibility of the chosen set of primitives. A few encodings are also provided to relate our proposal with existing ones.

The Klaim Project: Theory and Practice

Klaim (Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility) is an experimental language specifically designed to program distributed systems consisting of several mobile components that interact through multiple distributed tuple spaces. Klaim primitives allow programmers to distribute and retrieve data and processes to and from the nodes of a net. Moreover, localities are first-class citizens that can be dynamically created and communicated over the network. Components, both stationary and mobile, can explicitly refer and control the spatial structures of the network. This paper reports the experiences in the design and development of Klaim. Its main purpose is to outline the theoretical foundations of the main features of Klaim and its programming model. We also present a modal logic that permits reasoning about behavioural properties of systems and various type systems that help in controlling agents movements and actions. Extensions of the language in the direction of object oriented programming are also discussed together with the description of the implementation efforts which have lead to the current prototypes.

A Formal Approach to Autonomic Systems Programming: The SCEL Language

The autonomic computing paradigm has been proposed to cope with size, complexity, and dynamism of contemporary software-intensive systems. The challenge for language designers is to devise appropriate abstractions and linguistic primitives to deal with the large dimension of systems and with their need to adapt to the changes of the working environment and to the evolving requirements. We propose a set of programming abstractions that permit us to represent behaviors, knowledge, and aggregations according to specific policies and to support programming context-awareness, self-awareness, and adaptation. Based on these abstractions, we define SCEL (Software Component Ensemble Language), a kernel language whose solid semantic foundations lay also the basis for formal reasoning on autonomic systems behavior. To show expressiveness and effectiveness of SCEL;’s design, we present a Java implementation of the proposed abstractions and show how it can be exploited for programming a robotics scenario that is used as a running example for describing the features and potential of our approach.

A Language-Based Approach to Autonomic Computing

SCEL is a new language specifically designed to model autonomic components and their interaction. It brings together various programming abstractions that permit to directly represent knowledge, behaviors and aggregations according to specific policies. It also supports naturally programming self-awareness, context-awareness, and adaptation. In this paper, we first present design principles, syntax and operational semantics of SCEL. Then, we show how a dialect can be defined by appropriately instantiating the features of the language we left open to deal with different application domains and use this dialect to model a simple, yet illustrative, example application. Finally, we demonstrate that adaptation can be naturally expressed in SCEL.

Software update via mobile agent based programming

We describe a system that permits maintaining the software installed on several heterogeneous computers distributed over a network by taking advantage of the mobile agent paradigm. The applications are installed and updated only on the central server. When a new release of an application is installed on the server, agents are scattered along the network to update the application on the clients.To build a prototype system we use X-KLAIM, a programming language specifically designed to program distributed systems composed of several components interacting through multiple tuple spaces and mobile code.

Rate-Based Transition Systems for Stochastic Process Calculi

A variant of Rate Transition Systems (RTS), proposed by Klin and Sassone, is introduced and used as the basic model for defining stochastic behaviour of processes. The transition relation used in our variant associates to each process, for each action, the set of possible futures paired with a measure indicating their rates. We show how RTS can be used for providing the operational semantics of stochastic extensions of classical formalisms, namely CSP and CCS. We also show that our semantics for stochastic CCS guarantees associativity of parallel composition. Similarly, in contrast with the original definition by Priami, we argue that a semantics for stochastic *** -calculus can be provided that guarantees associativity of parallel composition.

An infrastructure language for open nets

The structure of open nets, like the Internet, is highly dynamic, as the topology of component networks continuously evolves. In this context, node connectivity is a key aspect and a language for distributed network-aware mobile applications should provide explicit mechanisms to handle it. In this paper, we address the problem of expressing dynamic changes of node connectivity at linguistic level and, in particular, we focus on a slight extension of the language KLAIM, that is targeted to this aim. The extension consists of the introduction of a new category of processes that, in addition to the standard process operations, can execute a few new coordination operations for establishing new connections, accepting connection requests and removing connections. Our extension puts forward a clean separation between the coordinator level and the user level and, hence, it is modular enough to be easily applicable also to other network-aware languages. We will also show that our approach can be used as a guide for actual distributed (i.e. without a single centralized server) implementations of mobile systems.

A modal logic for mobile agents

Klaim is an experimental programming language that supports a programming paradigm where both processes and data can be moved across different computing environments. The language relies on the use of explicit localities. This paper presents a temporal logic for specifying properties of Klaim programs. The logic is inspired by Hennessy-Milner Logic (HML) and the μ-calculus, but has novel features that permit dealing with state properties and impact of actions and movements over the different sites. The logic is equipped with a complete proof system that enables one to prove properties of mobile systems.

A uniform framework for modeling nondeterministic, probabilistic, stochastic, or mixed processes and their behavioral equivalences

Labeled transition systems are typically used as behavioral models of concurrent processes. Their labeled transitions define a one-step state-to-state reachability relation. This model can be generalized by modifying the transition relation to associate a state reachability distribution with any pair consisting of a source state and a transition label. The state reachability distribution is a function mapping each possible target state to a value that expresses the degree of one-step reachability of that state. Values are taken from a preordered set equipped with a minimum that denotes unreachability. By selecting suitable preordered sets, the resulting model, called ULTraS from Uniform Labeled Transition System, can be specialized to capture well-known models of fully nondeterministic processes (LTS), fully probabilistic processes (ADTMC), fully stochastic processes (ACTMC), and nondeterministic and probabilistic (MDP) or nondeterministic and stochastic (CTMDP) processes. This uniform treatment of different behavioral models extends to behavioral equivalences. They can be defined on ULTraS by relying on appropriate measure functions that express the degree of reachability of a set of states when performing multi-step computations. It is shown that the specializations of bisimulation, trace, and testing equivalences for the different classes of ULTraS coincide with the behavioral equivalences defined in the literature over traditional models except when nondeterminism and probability/stochasticity coexist; then new equivalences pop up.

The SCEL Language: Design, Implementation, Verification

SCEL (Service Component Ensemble Language) is a new language specifically designed to rigorously model and program autonomic components and their interaction, while supporting formal reasoning on their behaviors. SCEL brings together various programming abstractions that allow one to directly represent aggregations, behaviors and knowledge according to specific policies. It also naturally supports programming interaction, self-awareness, context-awareness, and adaptation. The solid semantic grounds of the language is exploited for developing logics, tools and methodologies for formal reasoning on system behavior to establish qualitative and quantitative properties of both the individual components and the overall systems.