The π-Calculus: A theory of mobile processes by Davide Sangiorgi and David Walker Formal methods have formed the foundation of Computer Science since its inception. Although, initially these formal methods dealt with processes and systems on an individual basis, the paradigm has shifted with the dawn of the age of computer networks. When dealing with systems with interconnected, communicating, dependent, cooperative, and competitive components, the older outlook of analyzing and developing singular systems—and the tools that went with it—were hardly suitable. This led to the development of theories and tools that would support the new paradigm. On the tools end, the development has been widespread and satisfactory: programming languages, development frameworks, databases, and even end-user software products such as word processors, have gained network-awareness. However on the theoretical end, the development has been far less satisfactory. The major work was done by Robin Milner, Joachim Parrow, and David Walker who developed the formalism known as π-calculus in 1989. π-calculus is a process calculus that treats communication between its components as the basic form of computation. It has been quite successful as a foundation of several other calculi in the field and as Milner puts it, it has become common to express ideas about interactions and mobility in variants of the calculus. Introduction The current book serves as a comprehensive reference to π-calculus. Besides Milner's own book on the subject, this is the only other book-length publication on the topic. In many ways, it is much more comprehensive than Milner's: a much wider area of topics are dealt with and in more detail as well. Contents The book is split into seven part. The first part presents the basic theory of π-calculus. However, basic does not mean concise: every topic is discussed in great detail. The section on bisimulation is particularly intensive and provides several insights about the motivation for the theory. Part two discusses several variants of the original calculus. By varying several characteristics of the calculus, such as whether a process can communicate with more than processes at a time, we can obtain these variants. A number of interesting properties of the language are studied by the other when discussing these variants. As can be understood from the title, the calculus' contribution to analyzing mobile processes is a major topic, and it is dealt with extensively starting from part three. The basics are introduced by the way of a sophisticated typing system whose application in speciying complex processes is presented in part four. Part five looks at higher-order π-calculus in which composed systems are considered as first-class citizens. Part six is one of the best in the book and discusses the relation between π-calculus and lambda-calculus, which is an older and more basic calculus. Finally part seven shows how π-calculus can be employed in studying practical, modern software engineering concepts such as object-oriented programming. Impressions One of my disappointments with this book is in how often the reader is left perplexed with some of the theoretical developments, specially in part three. π-calculus is a complicated topic, even for the graduate student audience to which this book is directed, and the author would have done much better by reducing the number of topics and instead focusing on more lucid and detailed explanations. There are several experimental digressions throughout the book, which although interesting, take away from some of the momentum of sequential study. For example, topics such as comparison and encoding of one language to another could be easily moved to a separate section in order to make the content more suitable for self-study. Another issue is the little effort towards making the connection from the theoretical to the practical. The main reason why formal methods have not been adopted in mainstream software development pracitces is that often it is unclear to developers how formalisms can contribute towards the software engineering process. The book would have served its purpose much better if it had spent part of eah chapter discussing the practical application of that chapter's content. For example, congruence checking and bisimulation can be incredbily exciting topics for programmers to learn if they can see practical applications of such powerful techniques. Beyond the above criticism, the book is absolutely indispensible to students and researchers in the field of formal methods. Currently it serves as the primary reference for anyone who wishes to learn the various aspects of π-calculus in detail. Raheel Ahmad

The Ï-Calculus: A theory of mobile processes

Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety critical; this makes their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the correctness of, or provide sufficient evidence for the certification of, autonomous robotics. Formal methods for autonomous robotics have received some attention in the literature, but no resource provides a current overview. This article systematically surveys the state of the art in formal specification and verification for autonomous robotics. Specially, it identifies and categorizes the challenges posed by, the formalisms aimed at, and the formal approaches for the specification and verification of autonomous robotics.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3342355

Formal Specification and Verification of Autonomous Robotic Systems: A Survey

Towards a generic design method for reconfigurable manufacturing systems: Analysis and synthesis of current design methods and evaluation of supportive tools

Autonomous robotic systems are complex, hybrid, and often safety-critical; this makes their formal specification and verification uniquely challenging. Though commonly used, testing and simulation alone are insufficient to ensure the correctness of, or provide sufficient evidence for the certification of, autonomous robotics. Formal methods for autonomous robotics has received some attention in the literature, but no resource provides a current overview. This paper systematically surveys the state-of-the-art in formal specification and verification for autonomous robotics. Specially, it identifies and categorises the challenges posed by, the formalisms aimed at, and the formal approaches for the specification and verification of autonomous robotics.

A new network forensic framework based on deep learning for Internet of Things networks: A particle deep framework

This paper presents the formal modeling and performance analysis of one of Internet of Things (IoT) protocols. The Internet of Things is among the subjects best financed in the industry and studied in the academic world. The rapid evolution of mobile Internet, the manufacture of mini hardware, microcomputer, and machine-to-machine (M2M) enabled IoT technologies to be at the top of media subjects. These technologies allow things or devices that are not computers to act intelligently and to make collaborative decisions that are beneficial for certain applications. Hence, the intelligent decision making, the self configuration and the ad hoc networking are from the main characteristics of IoT. Therefore, the implementation of protocols for IoT must comply the standards and satisfy the good properties. Using formal methods in the study of developed protocols ensure these conditions. In this paper, we use probabilistic timed automata for the formal modeling of Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and we use further statistical model checking of UPPAAL SMC tool-set for the performance evaluation of the protocol.

Formal specification, verification and evaluation of the MQTT protocol in the Internet of Things

This paper deals with the formal verification of reconfigurable discrete event control systems (RDECSs) using reconfigurable timed net condition/event systems (R-TNCESs) formalism. A reconfigurable system switches from a mode to another during its working process to adapt its behavior to the related environment. By including such a feature, RDECSs become complex and their verification is often expensive in terms of computation time and memory. In this paper, a new methodology for formal verification of RDECSs is proposed in order to ensure the correctness of these systems with a reduced cost (decreasing the verification time and memory occupation). The proposed contribution includes an improved modeling and verification of RDECSs. The modeling with R-TNCESs is enriched with all reconfiguration forms, and the verification involves an improvement method that avoids any redundancy and cancels unnecessary calculations. In addition, a visual tool called Rec-AG based on the proposed methodology is developed. The performance evaluation of this paper is achieved by measuring computation time and memory for several systems and different sizes of the problem. This paper’s contribution is applied to the benchmark production system FESTO.

On Methodology for the Verification of Reconfigurable Timed Net Condition/Event Systems

In reconfigurable manufacturing systems RMSs, the structure of the system can be changed during its execution. This reconfiguration can be triggered by several motivations: a new requirement in the production process, avoiding some problems caused by machines breakdowns, etc. RMSs are characterised by their flexibility which guarantees productivity and efficiency. However, their design is more complicated and needs new techniques and paradigms. The use of high level Petri nets PNs offers the ability to design these systems and to analyse their properties. In this article, the authors apply reconfigurable object nets RONs for the modelling, simulation and analysis of RMSs. Indeed, a formal method is proposed, where the reconfiguration process is specified explicitly as a graph transformation, the simulation is realised using the RON-tool, and the analysis exploits the TINA-tool timed nets analyser tool.

Designing reconfigurable manufacturing systems using reconfigurable object Petri nets

one of the important challenges in wireless sensors networks (WSN) resides in energy consumption In order to resolve this limitation, several solutions were proposed Re cently, the exploitation of mobile agent technologies in wirele ss sensor networks to optimize energy consumption attracts re searchers Despite their advantage as an ambitious solution, t he itineraries followed by migrating mobile agents can surcharge t he network and so have an impact on energy consumption Many researches have dealt with itinerary planning in WSNs through the u se of a single agent (SIP: Single agent Itinerary Planning) or mul tiple mobile agents (MIP: Multiple agents Itinerary Planning) H owever, the use of multi-agents causes the emergence of the data lo ad unbalancing problem among mobile agents, where the geographical distance is the unique factor motivating to plan the itinerary of the agents The data balancing factor has an important role especia lly in Wireless sensor networks multimedia that owns a considerable volume of data size It helps to optimize the tasks duration and thus optimizes the overall answer time of the network In this pa per, we provide a new MIP solution (GIGM-MIP) which is based not only on geographic information but also on the amount of da ta provided by each node to reduce the energy consumption of the n etwork The simulation experiments show that our approach is more efficient than other approaches in terms of task duration and the amount of energy consumption

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01935612/document

A new Itinerary Planning Approach Among Multiple Mobile Agents in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to Reduce Energy Consumption

The evolution in software and hardware systems from classical systems with rigid structures to open, dynamic, and flexible structures has inspired the extension of Petri nets to reconfiguration. The idea of reconfiguring Petri nets was launched in the early nineties and since then has been developed by several researchers at different levels of formalization. Researchers in this field have achieved a large amount of theoretical results and of practical applications. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of reconfigurable Petri nets dealing with several aspects including: the fundamental, theoretical basis, application domains, results at the verification/analysis level as well as practical tools. The paper finally discusses some future research directions.

Laid Kahloul

Papers

Formal specification, verification and evaluation of the MQTT protocol in the Internet of Things

On Methodology for the Verification of Reconfigurable Timed Net Condition/Event Systems

Designing reconfigurable manufacturing systems using reconfigurable object Petri nets

A new Itinerary Planning Approach Among Multiple Mobile Agents in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to Reduce Energy Consumption

Overview of Reconfigurable Petri Nets