Formal Aspects of Computing 

About: Formal Aspects of Computing is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Theory of computation & Correctness. It has an ISSN identifier of 0934-5043. Over the lifetime, 999 publications have been published receiving 21218 citations. The journal is also known as: FAC (Print) & Formal aspects of computing (Print).

A logic for reasoning about time and reability

Abstract: We present a logic for stating properties such as, "after a request for service there is at least a 98\045 probability that the service will be carried out within 2 seconds". The logic extends the temporal logic CTL by Emerson, Clarke and Sistla with time and probabil- ities. Formulas are interpreted over discrete time Markov chains. We give algorithms for checking that a given Markov chain satis- fies a formula in the logic. The algorithms require a polynomial number of arithmetic operations, in size of both the formula and\003This research report is a revised and extended version of a paper that has appeared under the title "A Framework for Reasoning about Time and Reliability" in the Proceeding of the 10thIEEE Real-time Systems Symposium, Santa Monica CA, December 1989. This work was partially supported by the Swedish Board for Technical Development (STU) as part of Esprit BRA Project SPEC, and by the Swedish Telecommunication Administration.1the Markov chain. A simple example is included to illustrate the algorithms.

A New Approach to Abstract Syntax with Variable Binding

Abstract: The permutation model of set theory with atoms (FM-sets), devised by Fraenkel and Mostowski in the 1930s, supports notions of `name-abstraction' and `fresh name' that provide a new way to represent, compute with, and reason about the syntax of formal systems involving variable-binding operations. Inductively defined FM-sets involving the name-abstraction set former (together with Cartesian product and disjoint union) can correctly encode syntax modulo renaming of bound variables. In this way, the standard theory of algebraic data types can be extended to encompass signatures involving binding operators. In particular, there is an associated notion of structural recursion for defining syntax-manipulating functions (such as capture avoiding substitution, set of free variables, etc.) and a notion of proof by structural induction, both of which remain pleasingly close to informal practice in computer science.

Frama-C: A software analysis perspective

Abstract: Frama-C is a source code analysis platform that aims at conducting verification of industrial-size C programs. It provides its users with a collection of plug-ins that perform static analysis, deductive verification, and testing, for safety- and security-critical software. Collaborative verification across cooperating plug-ins is enabled by their integration on top of a shared kernel and datastructures, and their compliance to a common specification language. This foundational article presents a consolidated view of the platform, its main and composite analyses, and some of its industrial achievements.

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Abstract: Workflow nets, a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property. This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets. We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the literature.