A Case Study on Formal Verification of Self-Adaptive Behaviors in a Decentralized System

Self-adaptation is a promising approach to manage the complexity of modern software systems. A self-adaptive system is able to adapt autonomously to internal dynamics and changing conditions in the environment to achieve particular quality goals. Our particular interest is in decentralized self-adaptive systems, in which central control of adaptation is not an option. One important challenge in self-adaptive systems, in particular those with decentralized control of adaptation, is to provide guarantees about the intended runtime qualities. In this paper, we present a case study in which we use model checking to verify behavioral properties of a decentralized self-adaptive system. Concretely, we contribute with a formalized architecture model of a decentralized traffic monitoring system and prove a number of self-adaptation properties for flexibility and robustness. To model the main processes in the system we use timed automata, and for the specification of the required properties we use timed computation tree logic. We use the Uppaal tool to specify the system and verify the flexibility and robustness properties.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2012, arXiv:1208.432

Software engineering techniques for statically analyzing mobile apps: research trends, characteristics, and potential for industrial adoption

Mobile platforms are rapidly and continuously changing, with support for new sensors, APIs, and programming abstractions. Static analysis is gaining a growing interest, allowing developers to predict properties about the run-time behavior of mobile apps without executing them. Over the years, literally hundreds of static analysis techniques have been proposed, ranging from structural and control-flow analysis to state-based analysis.In this paper, we present a systematic mapping study aimed at identifying, evaluating and classifying characteristics, trends and potential for industrial adoption of existing research in static analysis of mobile apps. Starting from over 12,000 potentially relevant studies, we applied a rigorous selection procedure resulting in 261 primary studies along a time span of 9 years. We analyzed each primary study according to a rigorously-defined classification framework. The results of this study give a solid foundation for assessing existing and future approaches for static analysis of mobile apps, especially in terms of their industrial adoptability.Researchers and practitioners can use the results of this study to (i) identify existing research/technical gaps to target, (ii) understand how approaches developed in academia can be successfully transferred to industry, and (iii) better position their (past and future) approaches for static analysis of mobile apps

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)

Choreography Automata

Online event due to covidInternational audienceAutomata models are well-established in many areas of computer science and are supported by a wealth of theoretical results including a wide range of algorithms and techniques to specify and analyse systems. We introduce choreography automata for the choreographic modelling of communicating systems. The projection of a choreography automaton yields a system of communicating finite-state machines. We consider both the standard asynchronous semantics of communicating systems and a synchronous variant of it. For both, the projections of well-formed automata are proved to be live as well as lock-and deadlock-free

Run Time Models in Adaptive Service Infrastructure

Software in the near ubiquitous future will need to cope with vari- ability, as software systems get deployed on an increasingly large diversity of computing platforms and operates in different execution environments. Heterogeneity of the underlying communication and computing infrastruc- ture, mobility inducing changes to the execution environments and therefore changes to the availability of resources and continuously evolving requirements require software systems to be adaptable according to the context changes. Software systems should also be reliable and meet the user's requirements and needs. Moreover, due to its pervasiveness, software systems must be de- pendable. Supporting the validation of these self-adaptive systems to ensure dependability requires a complete rethinking of the software life cycle. The traditional division among static analysis and dynamic analysis is blurred by the need to validate dynamic systems adaptation. Models play a key role in the validation of dependable systems, dynamic adaptation calls for the use of such models at run time. In this paper we describe the approach we have un- dertaken in recent projects to address the challenge of assessing dependability for adaptive software systems

CHOReVOLUTION: Automating the Realization of Highly–Collaborative Distributed Applications

Part 2: Tools (1)International audienceCHOReVOLUTION is a platform for the tool-assisted development and execution of scalable applications that leverage the distributed collaboration of services specified through service choreographies. It offers an Integrated Development and Runtime Environment (IDRE) comprising a wizard-aided development environment, a system monitoring console, and a back-end for managing the deployment and execution of the system on the cloud. We describe the platform by using a simple example and evaluate it against two industrial use cases in the domain of Smart Mobility & Tourism and Urban Traffic Coordination

CHOReVOLUTION: Hands-On In-Service Training for Choreography-Based Systems

Part 1: TutorialsInternational audienceCHOReVOLUTION is a platform for the tool-assisted development and execution of scalable applications that leverage the distributed collaboration of services specified through service choreographies. It offers an Integrated Development and Runtime Environment (IDRE) comprising a wizard-aided development environment, a system monitoring console, and a back-end for managing the deployment and execution of the system on the cloud. In this tutorial paper, we describe the platform and demonstrate its step-by-step application to an industrial use case in the domain of Smart Mobility & Tourism.(Demo Video: youtu.be/ae2jI9SYsvg)(GitHub: https://github.com/chorevolution/CHOReVOLUTION-IDRE

Proceedings of the IEEE World Congress on Services, Visionary Track on Service Composition for the Future Internet (SCFI 2015)

This document is a summary paper reporting on the IEEE Services 2015 Visionary Track on Service Composition for the Future Internet (SCFI 2015)