No abstract

We enrich spatial constraint systems with operators to specify information and processes moving from a space to another. We shall refer to these news structures as spatial constraint systems with extrusion. We shall investigate the properties of this new family of constraint systems and illustrate their applications. From a computational point of view the new operators provide for process/information extrusion, a central concept in formalisms for mobile communication. From an epistemic point of view extrusion corresponds to a notion we shall call utterance; a piece of information that an agent communicates to others but that may be inconsistent with the agent's beliefs. Utterances can then be used to express instances of epistemic notions, which are common place in social media, such as hoaxes or intentional lies. Spatial constraint systems with extrusion can be seen as complete Heyting algebras equipped with maps to account for spatial and epistemic specifications.

The notion of constraint system (cs) is central to declarative formalisms from concurrency theory such as process calculi for concurrent constraint programming (ccp). Constraint systems are often represented as lattices: their elements, called constraints, represent partial information and their order corresponds to entailment. Recently a notion of n-agent spatial cs was introduced to represent information in concurrent constraint programs for spatially distributed multiagent systems. From a computational point of view a spatial constraint system can be used to specify partial information holding in a given agent's space (local information). From an epistemic point of view a spatial cs can be used to specify information that a given agent considers true (beliefs). Spatial constraint systems, however, do not provide a mechanism for specifying the mobility of information/processes from one space to another. Information mobility is a fundamental aspect of concurrent systems.In this article we develop the theory of spatial constraint systems with operators to specify information and processes moving from a space to another. We shall investigate the properties of this new family of constraint systems and illustrate their applications. From a computational point of view the new operators $

Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) has been used over the last two decades as an elegant and expressive model for concurrent systems. It models systems of agents communicating by posting and querying partial information, represented as constraints over the variables of the system. This covers a vast variety of systems as those arising in biological phenomena, reactive systems, netcentric computing and the advent of social networks and cloud computing. In this paper we survey the main applications, developments and current trends of CCP.

Event-B is a modelling language and a formal methods approach for correct construction of software. This paper presents our work on code generation for Event-B, including the definition of a syntactic translation from Event-B to JML-annotated Java programs, the implementation of the translation as the EventB2Java tool, and two case studies on the use of EventB2Java. The first case study is on implementing an Android application with the aid of the EventB2Java tool, and the second on testing an Event-B specification of the Tokeneer security-critical system. Additionally, we have benchmarked our EventB2Java tool against two other Java code generators for Event-B.

No abstract

Most interactive scenarios are based on informal specifications, so that it is not possible to formally verify properties of such systems. We advocate the need for a general and formal model aiming at ensuring safe executions of interactive multimedia scenarios. Interactive scores (is) is a formalism based on temporal constraints to describe interactive scenarios. We propose new semantics for is based on timed event structures (TES). With such a semantics, we can specify more properties of the system, in particular, properties about execution traces, which are difficult to specify as constraints. We also present an operational semantics of is based on the non-deterministic timed concurrent constraint calculus and we relate such a semantics to the TES semantics. With the operational semantics, we can describe the behaviour of scores whose timed object durations can be arbitrary integer intervals.

Structures involving a lattice and join-endomorphisms on it are ubiquitous in computer science. We study the cardinality of the set E(L) of all joinendomorphisms of a given finite lattice L. In particular, we show that when L is Mn, the discrete order of n elements extended with top and bottom, |E(L)| = n!Ln(−1) + (n + 1) 2 where Ln(x) is the Laguerre polynomial of degree n. We also study the following problem: Given a lattice L of size n and a set S ⊆ E(L) of size m, find the greatest lower bound E(L) S. The join-endomorphism E(L) S has meaningful interpretations in epistemic logic, distributed systems, and Aumann structures. We show that this problem can be solved with worst-case time complexity in O(n + m log n) for powerset lattices, O(mn 2) for lattices of sets, and O(mn + n 3) for arbitrary lattices. The complexity is expressed in terms of the basic binary lattice operations performed by the algorithm.