Modelling statecharts behaviour in a fully abstract way

Huizing, Cornelis; Gerth, Rob; Roever, Willem P. de

doi:10.1007/bfb0026110

Cited by 43 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…Proving the soundness of causality analyses necessarily requires maintaining some form of refinement ("constructiveness" or "dependency") information about a lower-level asynchronous micro-step semantics. The first to observe this were Huizing et al [43] who showed that combining compositionality, causality and the Synchrony Hypothesis cannot be done within a single-levelled semantics (see also [24]). In other words, causality analysis establishes consistency of a synchronous macro-step with respect to an asynchronous micro-step execution model.…”

Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Denotational fixed-point semantics for constructive scheduling of synchronous concurrency

et al. 2015

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The synchronous model of concurrent computation (SMoCC) is well established for programming languages in the domain of safety-critical reactive and embedded systems. Translated into mainstream C/Java programming, the SMoCC corresponds to a cyclic execution model in which concurrent threads are synchronised on a logical clock that cuts system computation into a sequence of macro-steps. A causality analysis verifies the existence of a schedule on memory accesses to ensure each macro-step is deadlock-free and determinate. We introduce an abstract semantic domain I (D, P) and an associated denotational fixedpoint semantics for reasoning about concurrent and sequential variable accesses within a synchronous cycle-based model of computation. We use this domain for a new and extended behavioural definition of Berry's causality analysis in terms of approximation intervals. The domain I (D, P) extends the domain I (D) from our previous work and fixes a mistake in the treatment of initialisations. Based on this fixed-point semantics we propose the notion of Input Berry-constructiveness (IBC) for synchronous programs. This new IBC class lies properly between strong (SBC) and normal Berry-constructiveness (BC) defined in previous work. SBC and BC are two ways to interpret the standard constructive semantics of synchronous programming, as exemplified by imperative SMoCC languages such as Esterel or Quartz. SBC is often too restrictive as it requires all variables to be initialised by the program. BC can be too permissive because it initialises all variables to a fixed value, by default. Where the initialisation happens through the memory, e.g., when carrying values from one synchronous tick to the next, then IBC is more appropriate. IBC links two levels of execution, the macrostep level and the micro-step level. We prove that the denotational fixed-point analysis for IBC, and hence Berry's causality analysis, is sound with respect to operational micro-level scheduling. The denotational model can thus be viewed as a compositional presentation of J. Aguado · M. Mendler (B)

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Section: Motivationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Denotational fixed-point semantics for constructive scheduling of synchronous concurrency

et al. 2015

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“…This led to semantics B [28] which was responsive, but required the introduction of the notion of micro-steps: every observable action, i.e., every macrostep, was divided into an arbitrary finite number of micro-steps. Of this one, Rob Gerth, Cees Huizing and I developed a fully-abstract version [33]. The problem with this semantics is that if you take micro-steps in a different order, one may get a different observable result.…”

Section: The 5 Different Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unsurprisingly, the semantics of [28] is not compositional since bundling transitions into an atomic step implies forgetting about the transitions' causal justification [32]. This shortcoming has later been remedied in a fully-abstract fashion by Huizing, Gerth and de Roever [33]. In addition, the semantics of [28] is not globally consistent as it permits an event to be both present and absent within a step: an event that occurs negatively in the trigger of one firing transition may be generated by a transition that fires later within the same step.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question

Roever

Lüttgen

Mendler

2010

Time for Verification

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Abstract. In their seminal 1991 paper "What is in a Step: On the Semantics of Statecharts", Pnueli and Shalev showed how, in the presence of global consistency and while observing causality, the synchronous language Statecharts can be given coinciding operational and declarative step semantics. Over the past decade, this semantics has been supplemented with order-theoretic, denotational, axiomatic and game-theoretic characterisations, thus revealing itself as a rather canonical interpretation of the synchrony hypothesis. In this paper, we survey these characterisations and use them to emphasise the close but not widely known relations of Statecharts to the synchronous language Esterel and to the field of logic programming. Additionally, we highlight some early reminiscences on Amir Pnueli's contributions to characterise the semantics of Statecharts.

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“…Different resolutions of these issues have resulted in different variations of Statecharts semantics [17,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. The Viewcharts notation encapsulates these variations and, consequently, is not restricted to a particular variation of Statecharts.…”

Section: The Notationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioural Views for Software Requirements Engineering

1999

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This paper introduces the idea of a software behavioural view: intuitively, this is a complete description of the behaviour of the system observable from a specific point of view. We believe that a fully developed methodology based on views would significantly reduce the complexity of creating and understanding software requirements. In this paper we take the first steps towards such a methodology. We define a formal notation, Viewcharts, with a well-defined semantics based on Statecharts. Viewcharts gives a means for precisely describing views and their compositions. We show that Viewcharts reasonably capture the informal idea of a view by giving an example: a manufacturing control system. We show that Viewcharts have some advantages over Statecharts; in particular, Viewcharts add name space control to limit the scope of broadcast communication, solving a problem with Statecharts presented by Harel.

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Modelling statecharts behaviour in a fully abstract way

Cited by 43 publications

References 4 publications

Denotational fixed-point semantics for constructive scheduling of synchronous concurrency

Denotational fixed-point semantics for constructive scheduling of synchronous concurrency

What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question

Behavioural Views for Software Requirements Engineering

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