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Fundamentals of Software Engineering (selected papers of FSEN 2013)
Science of Computer Programming 112 (2015) 1–2
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Science of Computer Programming www.elsevier.com/locate/scico
Editorial
Fundamentals of Software Engineering (selected papers of FSEN 2013) This special issue contains the extended versions of the selected papers presented at the Fifth IPM International Conference on Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FSEN), Tehran, Iran, April 24–26, 2013. This event, FSEN 2013, was organized by the School of Computer Science at the Institute for Studies in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) in Iran, in cooperation with the ACM SIGSOFT and IFIP WG2.2. As in other engineering disciplines, engineering of software artifacts requires a solid foundation of science and mathematics to build reliable software systems. The interest in FSEN spans over a wide spectrum of software engineering concerns, from modeling to analysis, verification to testing, model-based development to compositional construction, using tools and techniques based on formal methods to support the product and the process. This interest covers a wide range of topics in software engineering, including semantics, specification languages, and applying formal methods to specific domains. The first paper of this special issue “In the quantitative automata zoo” is a survey by Arnd Hartmanns and Holger Hermanns on quantitative automata-based formalisms. The authors classify the models in the literature along four dimensions (stochastic delays, non-determinism, flows, distributions). For each model, the paper gives an informal description along with a simple illustration, based on a running example. The authors also describe several other aspects such as costs and rewards and provide pointers to some tools and analysis algorithms for each model. The next paper “Constrained narrowing for conditional equational theories modulo axioms” investigates narrowing for conditional equational theories. The authors Andrew Cholewa, Santiago Escobar and José Meseguer introduce a new notion of narrowing called constrained narrowing which offers several advantages over the state of the art such as greatly reducing the search space of narrowing. The main extension is to consider the conditional rewriting rules that contain extra variables in their conditions. In “Improving time bounded reachability computations in interactive Markov chains” Hassan Hatefi and Holger Hermanns propose a new approximation scheme for computing the maximal and minimal probabilities for time-bounded reachability in Interactive Markov Chain. The new approximation method improves the state-of-the-art in both efficiency of computation and tightness of approximation. The authors also propose a stable numerical framework for implementation of their theory and show experimental evidence to support its expected advantages. The paper “Lending Petri nets” by Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli and G. Michele Pinna proposes an extension of Petri nets, called Lending Petri Nets (LPN), in which transitions can be fired even in the absence of enough tokens in their presets. In such Petri nets the transitions can borrow tokens from some places. Lending tokens generates debts in the computation (represented by negative markings). The authors show that there are tight connections between provability in the Horn fragment of Propositional Contract Logic and reachability in LPNs. The last paper in this special issue “It is pointless to point in bounded heaps” by F.S. de Boer, M.M. Bonsangue and J.C. Rot introduces a new symbolic semantics for a class of programs with dynamic creation and unbounded allocation and deallocation of objects. The authors define a core programming language that focuses on dynamic allocation of variables. They describe two semantics for the defined programming language: concrete and symbolic. The concrete semantics is defined in terms of explicit representation of objects while the symbolic semantics represents the states symbolically. The paper contains a theorem to show that these two notion of semantics are in fact equivalent. The symbolic semantics is based on push down systems with a finite set of control states and a finite stack alphabet. The authors also show how their programming language can be extended with pointers.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2015.10.002 0167-6423/© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
2
Editorial
We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful and constructive reviews for the papers. We also express our appreciation to all authors who considered sending their papers to the FSEN’13 special issue.
Hossein Hojjat Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States Marjan Sirjani Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland a
Farhad Arbab a,b Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands b
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Science of Computer Programming www.elsevier.com/locate/scico
Editorial
Fundamentals of Software Engineering (selected papers of FSEN 2013) This special issue contains the extended versions of the selected papers presented at the Fifth IPM International Conference on Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FSEN), Tehran, Iran, April 24–26, 2013. This event, FSEN 2013, was organized by the School of Computer Science at the Institute for Studies in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) in Iran, in cooperation with the ACM SIGSOFT and IFIP WG2.2. As in other engineering disciplines, engineering of software artifacts requires a solid foundation of science and mathematics to build reliable software systems. The interest in FSEN spans over a wide spectrum of software engineering concerns, from modeling to analysis, verification to testing, model-based development to compositional construction, using tools and techniques based on formal methods to support the product and the process. This interest covers a wide range of topics in software engineering, including semantics, specification languages, and applying formal methods to specific domains. The first paper of this special issue “In the quantitative automata zoo” is a survey by Arnd Hartmanns and Holger Hermanns on quantitative automata-based formalisms. The authors classify the models in the literature along four dimensions (stochastic delays, non-determinism, flows, distributions). For each model, the paper gives an informal description along with a simple illustration, based on a running example. The authors also describe several other aspects such as costs and rewards and provide pointers to some tools and analysis algorithms for each model. The next paper “Constrained narrowing for conditional equational theories modulo axioms” investigates narrowing for conditional equational theories. The authors Andrew Cholewa, Santiago Escobar and José Meseguer introduce a new notion of narrowing called constrained narrowing which offers several advantages over the state of the art such as greatly reducing the search space of narrowing. The main extension is to consider the conditional rewriting rules that contain extra variables in their conditions. In “Improving time bounded reachability computations in interactive Markov chains” Hassan Hatefi and Holger Hermanns propose a new approximation scheme for computing the maximal and minimal probabilities for time-bounded reachability in Interactive Markov Chain. The new approximation method improves the state-of-the-art in both efficiency of computation and tightness of approximation. The authors also propose a stable numerical framework for implementation of their theory and show experimental evidence to support its expected advantages. The paper “Lending Petri nets” by Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli and G. Michele Pinna proposes an extension of Petri nets, called Lending Petri Nets (LPN), in which transitions can be fired even in the absence of enough tokens in their presets. In such Petri nets the transitions can borrow tokens from some places. Lending tokens generates debts in the computation (represented by negative markings). The authors show that there are tight connections between provability in the Horn fragment of Propositional Contract Logic and reachability in LPNs. The last paper in this special issue “It is pointless to point in bounded heaps” by F.S. de Boer, M.M. Bonsangue and J.C. Rot introduces a new symbolic semantics for a class of programs with dynamic creation and unbounded allocation and deallocation of objects. The authors define a core programming language that focuses on dynamic allocation of variables. They describe two semantics for the defined programming language: concrete and symbolic. The concrete semantics is defined in terms of explicit representation of objects while the symbolic semantics represents the states symbolically. The paper contains a theorem to show that these two notion of semantics are in fact equivalent. The symbolic semantics is based on push down systems with a finite set of control states and a finite stack alphabet. The authors also show how their programming language can be extended with pointers.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2015.10.002 0167-6423/© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.
2
Editorial
We would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful and constructive reviews for the papers. We also express our appreciation to all authors who considered sending their papers to the FSEN’13 special issue.
Hossein Hojjat Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States Marjan Sirjani Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland a
Farhad Arbab a,b Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands b
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands