@inproceedings{6042, abstract = {Static program analyzers are increasingly effective in checking correctness properties of programs and reporting any errors found, often in the form of error traces. However, developers still spend a significant amount of time on debugging. This involves processing long error traces in an effort to localize a bug to a relatively small part of the program and to identify its cause. In this paper, we present a technique for automated fault localization that, given a program and an error trace, efficiently narrows down the cause of the error to a few statements. These statements are then ranked in terms of their suspiciousness. Our technique relies only on the semantics of the given program and does not require any test cases or user guidance. In experiments on a set of C benchmarks, we show that our technique is effective in quickly isolating the cause of error while out-performing other state-of-the-art fault-localization techniques.}, author = {Christakis, Maria and Heizmann, Matthias and Mansur, Muhammad Numair and Schilling, Christian and Wüstholz, Valentin}, booktitle = {25th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems }, location = {Prague, Czech Republic}, pages = {226--243}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Semantic fault localization and suspiciousness ranking}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-17462-0_13}, volume = {11427}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{6035, abstract = {We present JuliaReach, a toolbox for set-based reachability analysis of dynamical systems. JuliaReach consists of two main packages: Reachability, containing implementations of reachability algorithms for continuous and hybrid systems, and LazySets, a standalone library that implements state-of-the-art algorithms for calculus with convex sets. The library offers both concrete and lazy set representations, where the latter stands for the ability to delay set computations until they are needed. The choice of the programming language Julia and the accompanying documentation of our toolbox allow researchers to easily translate set-based algorithms from mathematics to software in a platform-independent way, while achieving runtime performance that is comparable to statically compiled languages. Combining lazy operations in high dimensions and explicit computations in low dimensions, JuliaReach can be applied to solve complex, large-scale problems.}, author = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Forets, Marcelo and Frehse, Goran and Potomkin, Kostiantyn and Schilling, Christian}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control}, isbn = {9781450362825}, keywords = {reachability analysis, hybrid systems, lazy computation}, location = {Montreal, QC, Canada}, pages = {39--44}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{JuliaReach: A toolbox for set-based reachability}}, doi = {10.1145/3302504.3311804}, volume = {22}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{6428, abstract = {Safety and security are major concerns in the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Signal temporal logic (STL) was proposedas a language to specify and monitor the correctness of CPS relativeto formalized requirements. Incorporating STL into a developmentprocess enables designers to automatically monitor and diagnosetraces, compute robustness estimates based on requirements, andperform requirement falsification, leading to productivity gains inverification and validation activities; however, in its current formSTL is agnostic to the input/output classification of signals, andthis negatively impacts the relevance of the analysis results.In this paper we propose to make the interface explicit in theSTL language by introducing input/output signal declarations. Wethen define new measures of input vacuity and output robustnessthat better reflect the nature of the system and the specification in-tent. The resulting framework, which we call interface-aware signaltemporal logic (IA-STL), aids verification and validation activities.We demonstrate the benefits of IA-STL on several CPS analysisactivities: (1) robustness-driven sensitivity analysis, (2) falsificationand (3) fault localization. We describe an implementation of our en-hancement to STL and associated notions of robustness and vacuityin a prototype extension of Breach, a MATLAB®/Simulink®toolboxfor CPS verification and validation. We explore these methodologi-cal improvements and evaluate our results on two examples fromthe automotive domain: a benchmark powertrain control systemand a hydrogen fuel cell system.}, author = {Ferrere, Thomas and Nickovic, Dejan and Donzé, Alexandre and Ito, Hisahiro and Kapinski, James}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 22nd ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control}, isbn = {9781450362825}, location = {Montreal, Canada}, pages = {57--66}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Interface-aware signal temporal logic}}, doi = {10.1145/3302504.3311800}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{6462, abstract = {A controller is a device that interacts with a plant. At each time point,it reads the plant’s state and issues commands with the goal that the plant oper-ates optimally. Constructing optimal controllers is a fundamental and challengingproblem. Machine learning techniques have recently been successfully applied totrain controllers, yet they have limitations. Learned controllers are monolithic andhard to reason about. In particular, it is difficult to add features without retraining,to guarantee any level of performance, and to achieve acceptable performancewhen encountering untrained scenarios. These limitations can be addressed bydeploying quantitative run-timeshieldsthat serve as a proxy for the controller.At each time point, the shield reads the command issued by the controller andmay choose to alter it before passing it on to the plant. We show how optimalshields that interfere as little as possible while guaranteeing a desired level ofcontroller performance, can be generated systematically and automatically usingreactive synthesis. First, we abstract the plant by building a stochastic model.Second, we consider the learned controller to be a black box. Third, we mea-surecontroller performanceandshield interferenceby two quantitative run-timemeasures that are formally defined using weighted automata. Then, the problemof constructing a shield that guarantees maximal performance with minimal inter-ference is the problem of finding an optimal strategy in a stochastic2-player game“controller versus shield” played on the abstract state space of the plant with aquantitative objective obtained from combining the performance and interferencemeasures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by automatically con-structing lightweight shields for learned traffic-light controllers in various roadnetworks. The shields we generate avoid liveness bugs, improve controller per-formance in untrained and changing traffic situations, and add features to learnedcontrollers, such as giving priority to emergency vehicles.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Bloem, Roderick and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Konighofer, Bettina and Pranger, Stefan}, booktitle = {31st International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification}, isbn = {9783030255398}, issn = {0302-9743}, location = {New York, NY, United States}, pages = {630--649}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Run-time optimization for learned controllers through quantitative games}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-25540-4_36}, volume = {11561}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{6493, abstract = {We present two algorithmic approaches for synthesizing linear hybrid automata from experimental data. Unlike previous approaches, our algorithms work without a template and generate an automaton with nondeterministic guards and invariants, and with an arbitrary number and topology of modes. They thus construct a succinct model from the data and provide formal guarantees. In particular, (1) the generated automaton can reproduce the data up to a specified tolerance and (2) the automaton is tight, given the first guarantee. Our first approach encodes the synthesis problem as a logical formula in the theory of linear arithmetic, which can then be solved by an SMT solver. This approach minimizes the number of modes in the resulting model but is only feasible for limited data sets. To address scalability, we propose a second approach that does not enforce to find a minimal model. The algorithm constructs an initial automaton and then iteratively extends the automaton based on processing new data. Therefore the algorithm is well-suited for online and synthesis-in-the-loop applications. The core of the algorithm is a membership query that checks whether, within the specified tolerance, a given data set can result from the execution of a given automaton. We solve this membership problem for linear hybrid automata by repeated reachability computations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm on synthetic data sets and on cardiac-cell measurements.}, author = {Garcia Soto, Miriam and Henzinger, Thomas A and Schilling, Christian and Zeleznik, Luka}, booktitle = {31st International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification}, isbn = {9783030255398}, issn = {0302-9743}, keywords = {Synthesis, Linear hybrid automaton, Membership}, location = {New York City, NY, USA}, pages = {297--314}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Membership-based synthesis of linear hybrid automata}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-25540-4_16}, volume = {11561}, year = {2019}, } @article{6752, abstract = {Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods, as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several common modes to determine how the players move the token through the graph; e.g., in turn-based games the players alternate turns in moving the token. We study the bidding mode of moving the token, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied in infinite-duration games. The following bidding rule was previously defined and called Richman bidding. Both players have separate budgets, which sum up to 1. In each turn, a bidding takes place: Both players submit bids simultaneously, where a bid is legal if it does not exceed the available budget, and the higher bidder pays his bid to the other player and moves the token. The central question studied in bidding games is a necessary and sufficient initial budget for winning the game: a threshold budget in a vertex is a value t ∈ [0, 1] such that if Player 1’s budget exceeds t, he can win the game; and if Player 2’s budget exceeds 1 − t, he can win the game. Threshold budgets were previously shown to exist in every vertex of a reachability game, which have an interesting connection with random-turn games—a sub-class of simple stochastic games in which the player who moves is chosen randomly. We show the existence of threshold budgets for a qualitative class of infinite-duration games, namely parity games, and a quantitative class, namely mean-payoff games. The key component of the proof is a quantitative solution to strongly connected mean-payoff bidding games in which we extend the connection with random-turn games to these games, and construct explicit optimal strategies for both players.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Chonev, Ventsislav K}, issn = {1557735X}, journal = {Journal of the ACM}, number = {4}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Infinite-duration bidding games}}, doi = {10.1145/3340295}, volume = {66}, year = {2019}, } @article{7109, abstract = {We show how to construct temporal testers for the logic MITL, a prominent linear-time logic for real-time systems. A temporal tester is a transducer that inputs a signal holding the Boolean value of atomic propositions and outputs the truth value of a formula along time. Here we consider testers over continuous-time Boolean signals that use clock variables to enforce duration constraints, as in timed automata. We first rewrite the MITL formula into a “simple” formula using a limited set of temporal modalities. We then build testers for these specific modalities and show how to compose testers for simple formulae into complex ones. Temporal testers can be turned into acceptors, yielding a compositional translation from MITL to timed automata. This construction is much simpler than previously known and remains asymptotically optimal. It supports both past and future operators and can easily be extended.}, author = {Ferrere, Thomas and Maler, Oded and Ničković, Dejan and Pnueli, Amir}, issn = {0004-5411}, journal = {Journal of the ACM}, number = {3}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{From real-time logic to timed automata}}, doi = {10.1145/3286976}, volume = {66}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{7147, abstract = {The expression of a gene is characterised by its transcription factors and the function processing them. If the transcription factors are not affected by gene products, the regulating function is often represented as a combinational logic circuit, where the outputs (product) are determined by current input values (transcription factors) only, and are hence independent on their relative arrival times. However, the simultaneous arrival of transcription factors (TFs) in genetic circuits is a strong assumption, given that the processes of transcription and translation of a gene into a protein introduce intrinsic time delays and that there is no global synchronisation among the arrival times of different molecular species at molecular targets. In this paper, we construct an experimentally implementable genetic circuit with two inputs and a single output, such that, in presence of small delays in input arrival, the circuit exhibits qualitatively distinct observable phenotypes. In particular, these phenotypes are long lived transients: they all converge to a single value, but so slowly, that they seem stable for an extended time period, longer than typical experiment duration. We used rule-based language to prototype our circuit, and we implemented a search for finding the parameter combinations raising the phenotypes of interest. The behaviour of our prototype circuit has wide implications. First, it suggests that GRNs can exploit event timing to create phenotypes. Second, it opens the possibility that GRNs are using event timing to react to stimuli and memorise events, without explicit feedback in regulation. From the modelling perspective, our prototype circuit demonstrates the critical importance of analysing the transient dynamics at the promoter binding sites of the DNA, before applying rapid equilibrium assumptions.}, author = {Guet, Calin C and Henzinger, Thomas A and Igler, Claudia and Petrov, Tatjana and Sezgin, Ali}, booktitle = {17th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology}, isbn = {9783030313036}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Trieste, Italy}, pages = {155--187}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Transient memory in gene regulation}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-31304-3_9}, volume = {11773}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{7159, abstract = {Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) result in a tremendous amount of generated, measured and recorded time-series data. Extracting temporal segments that encode patterns with useful information out of these huge amounts of data is an extremely difficult problem. We propose shape expressions as a declarative formalism for specifying, querying and extracting sophisticated temporal patterns from possibly noisy data. Shape expressions are regular expressions with arbitrary (linear, exponential, sinusoidal, etc.) shapes with parameters as atomic predicates and additional constraints on these parameters. We equip shape expressions with a novel noisy semantics that combines regular expression matching semantics with statistical regression. We characterize essential properties of the formalism and propose an efficient approximate shape expression matching procedure. We demonstrate the wide applicability of this technique on two case studies. }, author = {Ničković, Dejan and Qin, Xin and Ferrere, Thomas and Mateis, Cristinel and Deshmukh, Jyotirmoy}, booktitle = {19th International Conference on Runtime Verification}, isbn = {9783030320782}, issn = {0302-9743}, location = {Porto, Portugal}, pages = {292--309}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Shape expressions for specifying and extracting signal features}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-32079-9_17}, volume = {11757}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{7231, abstract = {Piecewise Barrier Tubes (PBT) is a new technique for flowpipe overapproximation for nonlinear systems with polynomial dynamics, which leverages a combination of barrier certificates. PBT has advantages over traditional time-step based methods in dealing with those nonlinear dynamical systems in which there is a large difference in speed between trajectories, producing an overapproximation that is time independent. However, the existing approach for PBT is not efficient due to the application of interval methods for enclosure-box computation, and it can only deal with continuous dynamical systems without uncertainty. In this paper, we extend the approach with the ability to handle both continuous and hybrid dynamical systems with uncertainty that can reside in parameters and/or noise. We also improve the efficiency of the method significantly, by avoiding the use of interval-based methods for the enclosure-box computation without loosing soundness. We have developed a C++ prototype implementing the proposed approach and we evaluate it on several benchmarks. The experiments show that our approach is more efficient and precise than other methods in the literature.}, author = {Kong, Hui and Bartocci, Ezio and Jiang, Yu and Henzinger, Thomas A}, booktitle = {17th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems}, isbn = {978-3-0302-9661-2}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands}, pages = {123--141}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Piecewise robust barrier tubes for nonlinear hybrid systems with uncertainty}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-29662-9_8}, volume = {11750}, year = {2019}, } @inproceedings{7232, abstract = {We present Mixed-time Signal Temporal Logic (STL−MX), a specification formalism which extends STL by capturing the discrete/ continuous time duality found in many cyber-physical systems (CPS), as well as mixed-signal electronic designs. In STL−MX, properties of components with continuous dynamics are expressed in STL, while specifications of components with discrete dynamics are written in LTL. To combine the two layers, we evaluate formulas on two traces, discrete- and continuous-time, and introduce two interface operators that map signals, properties and their satisfaction signals across the two time domains. We show that STL-mx has the expressive power of STL supplemented with an implicit T-periodic clock signal. We develop and implement an algorithm for monitoring STL-mx formulas and illustrate the approach using a mixed-signal example. }, author = {Ferrere, Thomas and Maler, Oded and Nickovic, Dejan}, booktitle = {17th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems}, isbn = {978-3-0302-9661-2}, issn = {1611-3349}, location = {Amsterdam, The Netherlands}, pages = {59--75}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Mixed-time signal temporal logic}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-29662-9_4}, volume = {11750}, year = {2019}, } @phdthesis{6894, abstract = {Hybrid automata combine finite automata and dynamical systems, and model the interaction of digital with physical systems. Formal analysis that can guarantee the safety of all behaviors or rigorously witness failures, while unsolvable in general, has been tackled algorithmically using, e.g., abstraction, bounded model-checking, assisted theorem proving. Nevertheless, very few methods have addressed the time-unbounded reachability analysis of hybrid automata and, for current sound and automatic tools, scalability remains critical. We develop methods for the polyhedral abstraction of hybrid automata, which construct coarse overapproximations and tightens them incrementally, in a CEGAR fashion. We use template polyhedra, i.e., polyhedra whose facets are normal to a given set of directions. While, previously, directions were given by the user, we introduce (1) the first method for computing template directions from spurious counterexamples, so as to generalize and eliminate them. The method applies naturally to convex hybrid automata, i.e., hybrid automata with (possibly non-linear) convex constraints on derivatives only, while for linear ODE requires further abstraction. Specifically, we introduce (2) the conic abstractions, which, partitioning the state space into appropriate (possibly non-uniform) cones, divide curvy trajectories into relatively straight sections, suitable for polyhedral abstractions. Finally, we introduce (3) space-time interpolation, which, combining interval arithmetic and template refinement, computes appropriate (possibly non-uniform) time partitioning and template directions along spurious trajectories, so as to eliminate them. We obtain sound and automatic methods for the reachability analysis over dense and unbounded time of convex hybrid automata and hybrid automata with linear ODE. We build prototype tools and compare—favorably—our methods against the respective state-of-the-art tools, on several benchmarks.}, author = {Giacobbe, Mirco}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {132}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Automatic time-unbounded reachability analysis of hybrid systems}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:ISTA:6894}, year = {2019}, } @book{3300, abstract = {This book first explores the origins of this idea, grounded in theoretical work on temporal logic and automata. The editors and authors are among the world's leading researchers in this domain, and they contributed 32 chapters representing a thorough view of the development and application of the technique. Topics covered include binary decision diagrams, symbolic model checking, satisfiability modulo theories, partial-order reduction, abstraction, interpolation, concurrency, security protocols, games, probabilistic model checking, and process algebra, and chapters on the transfer of theory to industrial practice, property specification languages for hardware, and verification of real-time systems and hybrid systems. The book will be valuable for researchers and graduate students engaged with the development of formal methods and verification tools.}, author = {Clarke, Edmund M. and Henzinger, Thomas A and Veith, Helmut and Bloem, Roderick}, isbn = {978-3-319-10574-1}, pages = {XLVIII, 1212}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Handbook of Model Checking}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-10575-8}, year = {2018}, } @inbook{60, abstract = {Model checking is a computer-assisted method for the analysis of dynamical systems that can be modeled by state-transition systems. Drawing from research traditions in mathematical logic, programming languages, hardware design, and theoretical computer science, model checking is now widely used for the verification of hardware and software in industry. This chapter is an introduction and short survey of model checking. The chapter aims to motivate and link the individual chapters of the handbook, and to provide context for readers who are not familiar with model checking.}, author = {Clarke, Edmund and Henzinger, Thomas A and Veith, Helmut}, booktitle = {Handbook of Model Checking}, editor = {Henzinger, Thomas A}, pages = {1 -- 26}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Introduction to model checking}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-10575-8_1}, year = {2018}, } @inbook{86, abstract = {Responsiveness—the requirement that every request to a system be eventually handled—is one of the fundamental liveness properties of a reactive system. Average response time is a quantitative measure for the responsiveness requirement used commonly in performance evaluation. We show how average response time can be computed on state-transition graphs, on Markov chains, and on game graphs. In all three cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, booktitle = {Principles of Modeling}, editor = {Lohstroh, Marten and Derler, Patricia and Sirjani, Marjan}, pages = {143 -- 161}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Computing average response time}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_9}, volume = {10760}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{6005, abstract = {Network games are widely used as a model for selfish resource-allocation problems. In the classicalmodel, each player selects a path connecting her source and target vertices. The cost of traversingan edge depends on theload; namely, number of players that traverse it. Thus, it abstracts the factthat different users may use a resource at different times and for different durations, which playsan important role in determining the costs of the users in reality. For example, when transmittingpackets in a communication network, routing traffic in a road network, or processing a task in aproduction system, actual sharing and congestion of resources crucially depends on time.In [13], we introducedtimed network games, which add a time component to network games.Each vertexvin the network is associated with a cost function, mapping the load onvto theprice that a player pays for staying invfor one time unit with this load. Each edge in thenetwork is guarded by the time intervals in which it can be traversed, which forces the players tospend time in the vertices. In this work we significantly extend the way time can be referred toin timed network games. In the model we study, the network is equipped withclocks, and, as intimed automata, edges are guarded by constraints on the values of the clocks, and their traversalmay involve a reset of some clocks. We argue that the stronger model captures many realisticnetworks. The addition of clocks breaks the techniques we developed in [13] and we developnew techniques in order to show that positive results on classic network games carry over to thestronger timed setting.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Guha, Shibashis and Kupferman, Orna}, issn = {1868-8969}, location = {Liverpool, United Kingdom}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Timed network games with clocks}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPICS.MFCS.2018.23}, volume = {117}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{133, abstract = {Synchronous programs are easy to specify because the side effects of an operation are finished by the time the invocation of the operation returns to the caller. Asynchronous programs, on the other hand, are difficult to specify because there are side effects due to pending computation scheduled as a result of the invocation of an operation. They are also difficult to verify because of the large number of possible interleavings of concurrent computation threads. We present synchronization, a new proof rule that simplifies the verification of asynchronous programs by introducing the fiction, for proof purposes, that asynchronous operations complete synchronously. Synchronization summarizes an asynchronous computation as immediate atomic effect. Modular verification is enabled via pending asynchronous calls in atomic summaries, and a complementary proof rule that eliminates pending asynchronous calls when components and their specifications are composed. We evaluate synchronization in the context of a multi-layer refinement verification methodology on a collection of benchmark programs.}, author = {Kragl, Bernhard and Qadeer, Shaz and Henzinger, Thomas A}, issn = {18688969}, location = {Beijing, China}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Synchronizing the asynchronous}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2018.21}, volume = {118}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{299, abstract = {We introduce in this paper AMT 2.0 , a tool for qualitative and quantitative analysis of hybrid continuous and Boolean signals that combine numerical values and discrete events. The evaluation of the signals is based on rich temporal specifications expressed in extended Signal Temporal Logic (xSTL), which integrates Timed Regular Expressions (TRE) within Signal Temporal Logic (STL). The tool features qualitative monitoring (property satisfaction checking), trace diagnostics for explaining and justifying property violations and specification-driven measurement of quantitative features of the signal.}, author = {Nickovic, Dejan and Lebeltel, Olivier and Maler, Oded and Ferrere, Thomas and Ulus, Dogan}, editor = {Beyer, Dirk and Huisman, Marieke}, location = {Thessaloniki, Greece}, pages = {303 -- 319}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{AMT 2.0: Qualitative and quantitative trace analysis with extended signal temporal logic}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-89963-3_18}, volume = {10806}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{144, abstract = {The task of a monitor is to watch, at run-time, the execution of a reactive system, and signal the occurrence of a safety violation in the observed sequence of events. While finite-state monitors have been studied extensively, in practice, monitoring software also makes use of unbounded memory. We define a model of automata equipped with integer-valued registers which can execute only a bounded number of instructions between consecutive events, and thus can form the theoretical basis for the study of infinite-state monitors. We classify these register monitors according to the number k of available registers, and the type of register instructions. In stark contrast to the theory of computability for register machines, we prove that for every k 1, monitors with k + 1 counters (with instruction set 〈+1, =〉) are strictly more expressive than monitors with k counters. We also show that adder monitors (with instruction set 〈1, +, =〉) are strictly more expressive than counter monitors, but are complete for monitoring all computable safety -languages for k = 6. Real-time monitors are further required to signal the occurrence of a safety violation as soon as it occurs. The expressiveness hierarchy for counter monitors carries over to real-time monitors. We then show that 2 adders cannot simulate 3 counters in real-time. Finally, we show that real-time adder monitors with inequalities are as expressive as real-time Turing machines.}, author = {Ferrere, Thomas and Henzinger, Thomas A and Saraç, Ege}, location = {Oxford, UK}, pages = {394 -- 403}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{A theory of register monitors}}, doi = {10.1145/3209108.3209194}, volume = {Part F138033}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{182, abstract = {We describe a new algorithm for the parametric identification problem for signal temporal logic (STL), stated as follows. Given a densetime real-valued signal w and a parameterized temporal logic formula φ, compute the subset of the parameter space that renders the formula satisfied by the signal. Unlike previous solutions, which were based on search in the parameter space or quantifier elimination, our procedure works recursively on φ and computes the evolution over time of the set of valid parameter assignments. This procedure is similar to that of monitoring or computing the robustness of φ relative to w. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that this approach can work well in practice.}, author = {Bakhirkin, Alexey and Ferrere, Thomas and Maler, Oded}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Hybrid Systems}, isbn = {978-1-4503-5642-8 }, location = {Porto, Portugal}, pages = {177 -- 186}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Efficient parametric identification for STL}}, doi = {10.1145/3178126.3178132}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{5788, abstract = {In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. Such games are central in formal verification since they model the interaction between a non-terminating system and its environment. We study bidding games in which the players bid for the right to move the token. Two bidding rules have been defined. In Richman bidding, in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Poorman bidding is similar except that the winner of the bidding pays the “bank” rather than the other player. While poorman reachability games have been studied before, we present, for the first time, results on infinite-duration poorman games. A central quantity in these games is the ratio between the two players’ initial budgets. The questions we study concern a necessary and sufficient ratio with which a player can achieve a goal. For reachability objectives, such threshold ratios are known to exist for both bidding rules. We show that the properties of poorman reachability games extend to complex qualitative objectives such as parity, similarly to the Richman case. Our most interesting results concern quantitative poorman games, namely poorman mean-payoff games, where we construct optimal strategies depending on the initial ratio, by showing a connection with random-turn based games. The connection in itself is interesting, because it does not hold for reachability poorman games. We also solve the complexity problems that arise in poorman bidding games.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus}, isbn = {9783030046118}, issn = {03029743}, location = {Oxford, UK}, pages = {21--36}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Infinite-duration poorman-bidding games}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-04612-5_2}, volume = {11316}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{160, abstract = {We present layered concurrent programs, a compact and expressive notation for specifying refinement proofs of concurrent programs. A layered concurrent program specifies a sequence of connected concurrent programs, from most concrete to most abstract, such that common parts of different programs are written exactly once. These programs are expressed in the ordinary syntax of imperative concurrent programs using gated atomic actions, sequencing, choice, and (recursive) procedure calls. Each concurrent program is automatically extracted from the layered program. We reduce refinement to the safety of a sequence of concurrent checker programs, one each to justify the connection between every two consecutive concurrent programs. These checker programs are also automatically extracted from the layered program. Layered concurrent programs have been implemented in the CIVL verifier which has been successfully used for the verification of several complex concurrent programs.}, author = {Kragl, Bernhard and Qadeer, Shaz}, location = {Oxford, UK}, pages = {79 -- 102}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Layered Concurrent Programs}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-96145-3_5}, volume = {10981}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{183, abstract = {Fault-localization is considered to be a very tedious and time-consuming activity in the design of complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This laborious task essentially requires expert knowledge of the system in order to discover the cause of the fault. In this context, we propose a new procedure that AIDS designers in debugging Simulink/Stateflow hybrid system models, guided by Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications. The proposed method relies on three main ingredients: (1) a monitoring and a trace diagnostics procedure that checks whether a tested behavior satisfies or violates an STL specification, localizes time segments and interfaces variables contributing to the property violations; (2) a slicing procedure that maps these observable behavior segments to the internal states and transitions of the Simulink model; and (3) a spectrum-based fault-localization method that combines the previous analysis from multiple tests to identify the internal states and/or transitions that are the most likely to explain the fault. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on two Simulink models from the automotive and the avionics domain.}, author = {Bartocci, Ezio and Ferrere, Thomas and Manjunath, Niveditha and Nickovic, Dejan}, location = {Porto, Portugal}, pages = {197 -- 206}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery, Inc}, title = {{Localizing faults in simulink/stateflow models with STL}}, doi = {10.1145/3178126.3178131}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{81, abstract = {We solve the offline monitoring problem for timed propositional temporal logic (TPTL), interpreted over dense-time Boolean signals. The variant of TPTL we consider extends linear temporal logic (LTL) with clock variables and reset quantifiers, providing a mechanism to specify real-time constraints. We first describe a general monitoring algorithm based on an exhaustive computation of the set of satisfying clock assignments as a finite union of zones. We then propose a specialized monitoring algorithm for the one-variable case using a partition of the time domain based on the notion of region equivalence, whose complexity is linear in the length of the signal, thereby generalizing a known result regarding the monitoring of metric temporal logic (MTL). The region and zone representations of time constraints are known from timed automata verification and can also be used in the discrete-time case. Our prototype implementation appears to outperform previous discrete-time implementations of TPTL monitoring,}, author = {Elgyütt, Adrian and Ferrere, Thomas and Henzinger, Thomas A}, location = {Beijing, China}, pages = {53 -- 70}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Monitoring temporal logic with clock variables}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-00151-3_4}, volume = {11022}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{78, abstract = {We provide a procedure for detecting the sub-segments of an incrementally observed Boolean signal ω that match a given temporal pattern ϕ. As a pattern specification language, we use timed regular expressions, a formalism well-suited for expressing properties of concurrent asynchronous behaviors embedded in metric time. We construct a timed automaton accepting the timed language denoted by ϕ and modify it slightly for the purpose of matching. We then apply zone-based reachability computation to this automaton while it reads ω, and retrieve all the matching segments from the results. Since the procedure is automaton based, it can be applied to patterns specified by other formalisms such as timed temporal logics reducible to timed automata or directly encoded as timed automata. The procedure has been implemented and its performance on synthetic examples is demonstrated.}, author = {Bakhirkin, Alexey and Ferrere, Thomas and Nickovic, Dejan and Maler, Oded and Asarin, Eugene}, isbn = {978-3-030-00150-6}, location = {Bejing, China}, pages = {215 -- 232}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Online timed pattern matching using automata}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-00151-3_13}, volume = {11022}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{79, abstract = {Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the transition probabilities to account for stochastic uncertainties of the environment such as noise or input disturbances. We study pMDPs with reachability objectives where the parameter values are unknown and impossible to measure directly during execution, but there is a probability distribution known over the parameter values. We study for the first time computing parameter-independent strategies that are expectation optimal, i.e., optimize the expected reachability probability under the probability distribution over the parameters. We present an encoding of our problem to partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), i.e., a reduction of our problem to computing optimal strategies in POMDPs. We evaluate our method experimentally on several benchmarks: a motivating (repeated) learner model; a series of benchmarks of varying configurations of a robot moving on a grid; and a consensus protocol.}, author = {Arming, Sebastian and Bartocci, Ezio and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Katoen, Joost P and Sokolova, Ana}, location = {Beijing, China}, pages = {53--70}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Parameter-independent strategies for pMDPs via POMDPs}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-99154-2_4}, volume = {11024}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{142, abstract = {We address the problem of analyzing the reachable set of a polynomial nonlinear continuous system by over-approximating the flowpipe of its dynamics. The common approach to tackle this problem is to perform a numerical integration over a given time horizon based on Taylor expansion and interval arithmetic. However, this method results to be very conservative when there is a large difference in speed between trajectories as time progresses. In this paper, we propose to use combinations of barrier functions, which we call piecewise barrier tube (PBT), to over-approximate flowpipe. The basic idea of PBT is that for each segment of a flowpipe, a coarse box which is big enough to contain the segment is constructed using sampled simulation and then in the box we compute by linear programming a set of barrier functions (called barrier tube or BT for short) which work together to form a tube surrounding the flowpipe. The benefit of using PBT is that (1) BT is independent of time and hence can avoid being stretched and deformed by time; and (2) a small number of BTs can form a tight over-approximation for the flowpipe, which means that the computation required to decide whether the BTs intersect the unsafe set can be reduced significantly. We implemented a prototype called PBTS in C++. Experiments on some benchmark systems show that our approach is effective.}, author = {Kong, Hui and Bartocci, Ezio and Henzinger, Thomas A}, location = {Oxford, United Kingdom}, pages = {449 -- 467}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Reachable set over-approximation for nonlinear systems using piecewise barrier tubes}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-96145-3_24}, volume = {10981}, year = {2018}, } @article{434, abstract = {In this paper, we present a formal model-driven design approach to establish a safety-assured implementation of multifunction vehicle bus controller (MVBC), which controls the data transmission among the devices of the vehicle. First, the generic models and safety requirements described in International Electrotechnical Commission Standard 61375 are formalized as time automata and timed computation tree logic formulas, respectively. With model checking tool Uppaal, we verify whether or not the constructed timed automata satisfy the formulas and several logic inconsistencies in the original standard are detected and corrected. Then, we apply the code generation tool Times to generate C code from the verified model, which is later synthesized into a real MVBC chip, with some handwriting glue code. Furthermore, the runtime verification tool RMOR is applied on the integrated code, to verify some safety requirements that cannot be formalized on the timed automata. For evaluation, we compare the proposed approach with existing MVBC design methods, such as BeagleBone, Galsblock, and Simulink. Experiments show that more ambiguousness or bugs in the standard are detected during Uppaal verification, and the generated code of Times outperforms the C code generated by others in terms of the synthesized binary code size. The errors in the standard have been confirmed and the resulting MVBC has been deployed in the real train communication network.}, author = {Jiang, Yu and Liu, Han and Song, Huobing and Kong, Hui and Wang, Rui and Guan, Yong and Sha, Lui}, journal = {IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems}, number = {10}, pages = {3320 -- 3333}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Safety-assured model-driven design of the multifunction vehicle bus controller}}, doi = {10.1109/TITS.2017.2778077}, volume = {19}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{140, abstract = {Reachability analysis is difficult for hybrid automata with affine differential equations, because the reach set needs to be approximated. Promising abstraction techniques usually employ interval methods or template polyhedra. Interval methods account for dense time and guarantee soundness, and there are interval-based tools that overapproximate affine flowpipes. But interval methods impose bounded and rigid shapes, which make refinement expensive and fixpoint detection difficult. Template polyhedra, on the other hand, can be adapted flexibly and can be unbounded, but sound template refinement for unbounded reachability analysis has been implemented only for systems with piecewise constant dynamics. We capitalize on the advantages of both techniques, combining interval arithmetic and template polyhedra, using the former to abstract time and the latter to abstract space. During a CEGAR loop, whenever a spurious error trajectory is found, we compute additional space constraints and split time intervals, and use these space-time interpolants to eliminate the counterexample. Space-time interpolation offers a lazy, flexible framework for increasing precision while guaranteeing soundness, both for error avoidance and fixpoint detection. To the best of out knowledge, this is the first abstraction refinement scheme for the reachability analysis over unbounded and dense time of affine hybrid systems, which is both sound and automatic. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with several benchmark examples, which cannot be handled by other tools.}, author = {Frehse, Goran and Giacobbe, Mirco and Henzinger, Thomas A}, issn = {03029743}, location = {Oxford, United Kingdom}, pages = {468 -- 486}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Space-time interpolants}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-96145-3_25}, volume = {10981}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{297, abstract = {Graph games played by two players over finite-state graphs are central in many problems in computer science. In particular, graph games with ω -regular winning conditions, specified as parity objectives, which can express properties such as safety, liveness, fairness, are the basic framework for verification and synthesis of reactive systems. The decisions for a player at various states of the graph game are represented as strategies. While the algorithmic problem for solving graph games with parity objectives has been widely studied, the most prominent data-structure for strategy representation in graph games has been binary decision diagrams (BDDs). However, due to the bit-level representation, BDDs do not retain the inherent flavor of the decisions of strategies, and are notoriously hard to minimize to obtain succinct representation. In this work we propose decision trees for strategy representation in graph games. Decision trees retain the flavor of decisions of strategies and allow entropy-based minimization to obtain succinct trees. However, decision trees work in settings (e.g., probabilistic models) where errors are allowed, and overfitting of data is typically avoided. In contrast, for strategies in graph games no error is allowed, and the decision tree must represent the entire strategy. We develop new techniques to extend decision trees to overcome the above obstacles, while retaining the entropy-based techniques to obtain succinct trees. We have implemented our techniques to extend the existing decision tree solvers. We present experimental results for problems in reactive synthesis to show that decision trees provide a much more efficient data-structure for strategy representation as compared to BDDs.}, author = {Brázdil, Tomáš and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Kretinsky, Jan and Toman, Viktor}, location = {Thessaloniki, Greece}, pages = {385 -- 407}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Strategy representation by decision trees in reactive synthesis}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-89960-2_21}, volume = {10805}, year = {2018}, } @article{608, abstract = {Synthesis is the automated construction of a system from its specification. In real life, hardware and software systems are rarely constructed from scratch. Rather, a system is typically constructed from a library of components. Lustig and Vardi formalized this intuition and studied LTL synthesis from component libraries. In real life, designers seek optimal systems. In this paper we add optimality considerations to the setting. We distinguish between quality considerations (for example, size - the smaller a system is, the better it is), and pricing (for example, the payment to the company who manufactured the component). We study the problem of designing systems with minimal quality-cost and price. A key point is that while the quality cost is individual - the choices of a designer are independent of choices made by other designers that use the same library, pricing gives rise to a resource-allocation game - designers that use the same component share its price, with the share being proportional to the number of uses (a component can be used several times in a design). We study both closed and open settings, and in both we solve the problem of finding an optimal design. In a setting with multiple designers, we also study the game-theoretic problems of the induced resource-allocation game.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Kupferman, Orna}, journal = {Theoretical Computer Science}, pages = {50 -- 72}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Synthesis from component libraries with costs}}, doi = {10.1016/j.tcs.2017.11.001}, volume = {712}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{156, abstract = {Imprecision in timing can sometimes be beneficial: Metric interval temporal logic (MITL), disabling the expression of punctuality constraints, was shown to translate to timed automata, yielding an elementary decision procedure. We show how this principle extends to other forms of dense-time specification using regular expressions. By providing a clean, automaton-based formal framework for non-punctual languages, we are able to recover and extend several results in timed systems. Metric interval regular expressions (MIRE) are introduced, providing regular expressions with non-singular duration constraints. We obtain that MIRE are expressively complete relative to a class of one-clock timed automata, which can be determinized using additional clocks. Metric interval dynamic logic (MIDL) is then defined using MIRE as temporal modalities. We show that MIDL generalizes known extensions of MITL, while translating to timed automata at comparable cost.}, author = {Ferrere, Thomas}, location = {Oxford, UK}, pages = {147 -- 164}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{The compound interest in relaxing punctuality}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-95582-7_9}, volume = {10951}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{5959, abstract = {Formalizing properties of systems with continuous dynamics is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a formal framework for specifying and monitoring rich temporal properties of real-valued signals. We introduce signal first-order logic (SFO) as a specification language that combines first-order logic with linear-real arithmetic and unary function symbols interpreted as piecewise-linear signals. We first show that while the satisfiability problem for SFO is undecidable, its membership and monitoring problems are decidable. We develop an offline monitoring procedure for SFO that has polynomial complexity in the size of the input trace and the specification, for a fixed number of quantifiers and function symbols. We show that the algorithm has computation time linear in the size of the input trace for the important fragment of bounded-response specifications interpreted over input traces with finite variability. We can use our results to extend signal temporal logic with first-order quantifiers over time and value parameters, while preserving its efficient monitoring. We finally demonstrate the practical appeal of our logic through a case study in the micro-electronics domain.}, author = {Bakhirkin, Alexey and Ferrere, Thomas and Henzinger, Thomas A and Nickovicl, Deian}, booktitle = {2018 International Conference on Embedded Software}, isbn = {9781538655603}, location = {Turin, Italy}, pages = {1--10}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Keynote: The first-order logic of signals}}, doi = {10.1109/emsoft.2018.8537203}, year = {2018}, } @inproceedings{24, abstract = {Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies that optimize the expectation of the discounted-sum payoff. A key drawback of the expectation measure is that even low probability events with extreme payoff can significantly affect the expectation, and thus the obtained policies are not necessarily risk-averse. An alternate approach is to optimize the probability that the payoff is above a certain threshold, which allows obtaining risk-averse policies, but ignores optimization of the expectation. We consider the expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantee (EOPG) problem, where the goal is to optimize the expectation ensuring that the payoff is above a given threshold with at least a specified probability. We present several results on the EOPG problem, including the first algorithm to solve it.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Elgyütt, Adrian and Novotny, Petr and Rouillé, Owen}, location = {Stockholm, Sweden}, pages = {4692 -- 4699}, publisher = {IJCAI}, title = {{Expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantees in POMDPs with discounted-sum objectives}}, doi = {10.24963/ijcai.2018/652}, volume = {2018}, year = {2018}, } @article{6006, abstract = {Network games (NGs) are played on directed graphs and are extensively used in network design and analysis. Search problems for NGs include finding special strategy profiles such as a Nash equilibrium and a globally-optimal solution. The networks modeled by NGs may be huge. In formal verification, abstraction has proven to be an extremely effective technique for reasoning about systems with big and even infinite state spaces. We describe an abstraction-refinement methodology for reasoning about NGs. Our methodology is based on an abstraction function that maps the state space of an NG to a much smaller state space. We search for a global optimum and a Nash equilibrium by reasoning on an under- and an over-approximation defined on top of this smaller state space. When the approximations are too coarse to find such profiles, we refine the abstraction function. We extend the abstraction-refinement methodology to labeled networks, where the objectives of the players are regular languages. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology. }, author = {Avni, Guy and Guha, Shibashis and Kupferman, Orna}, issn = {2073-4336}, journal = {Games}, number = {3}, publisher = {MDPI AG}, title = {{An abstraction-refinement methodology for reasoning about network games}}, doi = {10.3390/g9030039}, volume = {9}, year = {2018}, } @article{5677, abstract = {Recently, contract-based design has been proposed as an “orthogonal” approach that complements system design methodologies proposed so far to cope with the complexity of system design. Contract-based design provides a rigorous scaffolding for verification, analysis, abstraction/refinement, and even synthesis. A number of results have been obtained in this domain but a unified treatment of the topic that can help put contract-based design in perspective was missing. This monograph intends to provide such a treatment where contracts are precisely defined and characterized so that they can be used in design methodologies with no ambiguity. In particular, this monograph identifies the essence of complex system design using contracts through a mathematical “meta-theory”, where all the properties of the methodology are derived from a very abstract and generic notion of contract. We show that the meta-theory provides deep and illuminating links with existing contract and interface theories, as well as guidelines for designing new theories. Our study encompasses contracts for both software and systems, with emphasis on the latter. We illustrate the use of contracts with two examples: requirement engineering for a parking garage management, and the development of contracts for timing and scheduling in the context of the Autosar methodology in use in the automotive sector.}, author = {Benveniste, Albert and Nickovic, Dejan and Caillaud, Benoît and Passerone, Roberto and Raclet, Jean Baptiste and Reinkemeier, Philipp and Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Alberto and Damm, Werner and Henzinger, Thomas A and Larsen, Kim G.}, issn = {1551-3939}, journal = {Foundations and Trends in Electronic Design Automation}, number = {2-3}, pages = {124--400}, publisher = {Now Publishers}, title = {{Contracts for system design}}, doi = {10.1561/1000000053}, volume = {12}, year = {2018}, } @article{10418, abstract = {We present a new proof rule for proving almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs, including those that contain demonic non-determinism. An important question for a probabilistic program is whether the probability mass of all its diverging runs is zero, that is that it terminates "almost surely". Proving that can be hard, and this paper presents a new method for doing so. It applies directly to the program's source code, even if the program contains demonic choice. Like others, we use variant functions (a.k.a. "super-martingales") that are real-valued and decrease randomly on each loop iteration; but our key innovation is that the amount as well as the probability of the decrease are parametric. We prove the soundness of the new rule, indicate where its applicability goes beyond existing rules, and explain its connection to classical results on denumerable (non-demonic) Markov chains.}, author = {Mciver, Annabelle and Morgan, Carroll and Kaminski, Benjamin Lucien and Katoen, Joost P}, issn = {2475-1421}, journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages}, location = {Los Angeles, CA, United States}, number = {POPL}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, title = {{A new proof rule for almost-sure termination}}, doi = {10.1145/3158121}, volume = {2}, year = {2017}, } @article{471, abstract = {We present a new algorithm for the statistical model checking of Markov chains with respect to unbounded temporal properties, including full linear temporal logic. The main idea is that we monitor each simulation run on the fly, in order to detect quickly if a bottom strongly connected component is entered with high probability, in which case the simulation run can be terminated early. As a result, our simulation runs are often much shorter than required by termination bounds that are computed a priori for a desired level of confidence on a large state space. In comparison to previous algorithms for statistical model checking our method is not only faster in many cases but also requires less information about the system, namely, only the minimum transition probability that occurs in the Markov chain. In addition, our method can be generalised to unbounded quantitative properties such as mean-payoff bounds. }, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kretinsky, Jan and Petrov, Tatjana}, issn = {15293785}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL)}, number = {2}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Faster statistical model checking for unbounded temporal properties}}, doi = {10.1145/3060139}, volume = {18}, year = {2017}, } @article{467, abstract = {Recently there has been a significant effort to handle quantitative properties in formal verification and synthesis. While weighted automata over finite and infinite words provide a natural and flexible framework to express quantitative properties, perhaps surprisingly, some basic system properties such as average response time cannot be expressed using weighted automata or in any other known decidable formalism. In this work, we introduce nested weighted automata as a natural extension of weighted automata, which makes it possible to express important quantitative properties such as average response time. In nested weighted automata, a master automaton spins off and collects results from weighted slave automata, each of which computes a quantity along a finite portion of an infinite word. Nested weighted automata can be viewed as the quantitative analogue of monitor automata, which are used in runtime verification. We establish an almost-complete decidability picture for the basic decision problems about nested weighted automata and illustrate their applicability in several domains. In particular, nested weighted automata can be used to decide average response time properties.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, issn = {15293785}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL)}, number = {4}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Nested weighted automata}}, doi = {10.1145/3152769}, volume = {18}, year = {2017}, } @article{465, abstract = {The edit distance between two words w 1 , w 2 is the minimal number of word operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to transform w 1 to w 2 . The edit distance generalizes to languages L 1 , L 2 , where the edit distance from L 1 to L 2 is the minimal number k such that for every word from L 1 there exists a word in L 2 with edit distance at most k . We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to a pushdown automaton is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and complexity for the following problems: (1) deciding whether, for a given threshold k , the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is at most k , and (2) deciding whether the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is finite. }, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus and Otop, Jan}, issn = {18605974}, journal = {Logical Methods in Computer Science}, number = {3}, publisher = {International Federation of Computational Logic}, title = {{Edit distance for pushdown automata}}, doi = {10.23638/LMCS-13(3:23)2017}, volume = {13}, year = {2017}, } @inbook{625, abstract = {In the analysis of reactive systems a quantitative objective assigns a real value to every trace of the system. The value decision problem for a quantitative objective requires a trace whose value is at least a given threshold, and the exact value decision problem requires a trace whose value is exactly the threshold. We compare the computational complexity of the value and exact value decision problems for classical quantitative objectives, such as sum, discounted sum, energy, and mean-payoff for two standard models of reactive systems, namely, graphs and graph games.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Doyen, Laurent and Henzinger, Thomas A}, booktitle = {Models, Algorithms, Logics and Tools}, editor = {Aceto, Luca and Bacci, Giorgio and Ingólfsdóttir, Anna and Legay, Axel and Mardare, Radu}, isbn = {978-3-319-63120-2}, issn = {0302-9743}, pages = {367 -- 381}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{The cost of exactness in quantitative reachability}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-63121-9_18}, volume = {10460}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{633, abstract = {A Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) is an algorithm which can search a non-convex region of space by incrementally building a space-filling tree. The tree is constructed from random points drawn from system’s state space and is biased to grow towards large unexplored areas in the system. RRT can provide better coverage of a system’s possible behaviors compared with random simulations, but is more lightweight than full reachability analysis. In this paper, we explore some of the design decisions encountered while implementing a hybrid extension of the RRT algorithm, which have not been elaborated on before. In particular, we focus on handling non-determinism, which arises due to discrete transitions. We introduce the notion of important points to account for this phenomena. We showcase our ideas using heater and navigation benchmarks.}, author = {Bak, Stanley and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kumar, Aviral}, editor = {Abate, Alessandro and Bodo, Sylvie}, isbn = {978-331963500-2}, location = {Heidelberg, Germany}, pages = {83 -- 89}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Challenges and tool implementation of hybrid rapidly exploring random trees}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-63501-9_6}, volume = {10381}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{636, abstract = {Signal regular expressions can specify sequential properties of real-valued signals based on threshold conditions, regular operations, and duration constraints. In this paper we endow them with a quantitative semantics which indicates how robustly a signal matches or does not match a given expression. First, we show that this semantics is a safe approximation of a distance between the signal and the language defined by the expression. Then, we consider the robust matching problem, that is, computing the quantitative semantics of every segment of a given signal relative to an expression. We present an algorithm that solves this problem for piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear signals and show that for such signals the robustness map is a piecewise-linear function. The availability of an indicator describing how robustly a signal segment matches some regular pattern provides a general framework for quantitative monitoring of cyber-physical systems.}, author = {Bakhirkin, Alexey and Ferrere, Thomas and Maler, Oded and Ulus, Dogan}, editor = {Abate, Alessandro and Geeraerts, Gilles}, isbn = {978-331965764-6}, location = {Berlin, Germany}, pages = {189 -- 206}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{On the quantitative semantics of regular expressions over real-valued signals}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-65765-3_11}, volume = {10419}, year = {2017}, } @proceedings{638, abstract = {This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th InternationalWorkshop on Numerical Software Verification, NSV 2016, held in Toronto, ON, Canada in July 2011 - colocated with CAV 2016, the 28th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification. The NSV workshop is dedicated to the development of logical and mathematical techniques for the reasoning about programmability and reliability.}, editor = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Martel, Matthieu and Prabhakar, Pavithra}, issn = {0302-9743}, location = {Toronto, ON, Canada}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Numerical Software Verification}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-54292-8}, volume = {10152}, year = {2017}, } @misc{6426, abstract = {Synchronous programs are easy to specify because the side effects of an operation are finished by the time the invocation of the operation returns to the caller. Asynchronous programs, on the other hand, are difficult to specify because there are side effects due to pending computation scheduled as a result of the invocation of an operation. They are also difficult to verify because of the large number of possible interleavings of concurrent asynchronous computation threads. We show that specifications and correctness proofs for asynchronous programs can be structured by introducing the fiction, for proof purposes, that intermediate, non-quiescent states of asynchronous operations can be ignored. Then, the task of specification becomes relatively simple and the task of verification can be naturally decomposed into smaller sub-tasks. The sub-tasks iteratively summarize, guided by the structure of an asynchronous program, the atomic effect of non-atomic operations and the synchronous effect of asynchronous operations. This structuring of specifications and proofs corresponds to the introduction of multiple layers of stepwise refinement for asynchronous programs. We present the first proof rule, called synchronization, to reduce asynchronous invocations on a lower layer to synchronous invocations on a higher layer. We implemented our proof method in CIVL and evaluated it on a collection of benchmark programs.}, author = {Henzinger, Thomas A and Kragl, Bernhard and Qadeer, Shaz}, issn = {2664-1690}, pages = {28}, publisher = {IST Austria}, title = {{Synchronizing the asynchronous}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:IST-2018-853-v2-2}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{663, abstract = {In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically compute invariant clusters for nonlinear semialgebraic hybrid systems. An invariant cluster for an ordinary differential equation (ODE) is a multivariate polynomial invariant g(u→, x→) = 0, parametric in u→, which can yield an infinite number of concrete invariants by assigning different values to u→ so that every trajectory of the system can be overapproximated precisely by the intersection of a group of concrete invariants. For semialgebraic systems, which involve ODEs with multivariate polynomial right-hand sides, given a template multivariate polynomial g(u→, x→), an invariant cluster can be obtained by first computing the remainder of the Lie derivative of g(u→, x→) divided by g(u→, x→) and then solving the system of polynomial equations obtained from the coefficients of the remainder. Based on invariant clusters and sum-of-squares (SOS) programming, we present a new method for the safety verification of hybrid systems. Experiments on nonlinear benchmark systems from biology and control theory show that our approach is efficient. }, author = {Kong, Hui and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Schilling, Christian and Jiang, Yu and Henzinger, Thomas A}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Hybrid Systems}, isbn = {978-145034590-3}, location = {Pittsburgh, PA, United States}, pages = {163 -- 172}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Safety verification of nonlinear hybrid systems based on invariant clusters}}, doi = {10.1145/3049797.3049814}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{711, abstract = {Nested weighted automata (NWA) present a robust and convenient automata-theoretic formalism for quantitative specifications. Previous works have considered NWA that processed input words only in the forward direction. It is natural to allow the automata to process input words backwards as well, for example, to measure the maximal or average time between a response and the preceding request. We therefore introduce and study bidirectional NWA that can process input words in both directions. First, we show that bidirectional NWA can express interesting quantitative properties that are not expressible by forward-only NWA. Second, for the fundamental decision problems of emptiness and universality, we establish decidability and complexity results for the new framework which match the best-known results for the special case of forward-only NWA. Thus, for NWA, the increased expressiveness of bidirectionality is achieved at no additional computational complexity. This is in stark contrast to the unweighted case, where bidirectional finite automata are no more expressive but exponentially more succinct than their forward-only counterparts.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, issn = {18688969}, location = {Berlin, Germany}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Bidirectional nested weighted automata}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2017.5}, volume = {85}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{963, abstract = {Network games are widely used as a model for selfish resource-allocation problems. In the classical model, each player selects a path connecting her source and target vertex. The cost of traversing an edge depends on the number of players that traverse it. Thus, it abstracts the fact that different users may use a resource at different times and for different durations, which plays an important role in defining the costs of the users in reality. For example, when transmitting packets in a communication network, routing traffic in a road network, or processing a task in a production system, the traversal of the network involves an inherent delay, and so sharing and congestion of resources crucially depends on time. We study timed network games , which add a time component to network games. Each vertex v in the network is associated with a cost function, mapping the load on v to the price that a player pays for staying in v for one time unit with this load. In addition, each edge has a guard, describing time intervals in which the edge can be traversed, forcing the players to spend time on vertices. Unlike earlier work that add a time component to network games, the time in our model is continuous and cannot be discretized. In particular, players have uncountably many strategies, and a game may have uncountably many pure Nash equilibria. We study properties of timed network games with cost-sharing or congestion cost functions: their stability, equilibrium inefficiency, and complexity. In particular, we show that the answer to the question whether we can restrict attention to boundary strategies, namely ones in which edges are traversed only at the boundaries of guards, is mixed. }, author = {Avni, Guy and Guha, Shibashis and Kupferman, Orna}, issn = {18688969}, location = {Aalborg, Denmark}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Timed network games with clocks}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2017.37}, volume = {83}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{941, abstract = {Recently there has been a proliferation of automated program repair (APR) techniques, targeting various programming languages. Such techniques can be generally classified into two families: syntactic- and semantics-based. Semantics-based APR, on which we focus, typically uses symbolic execution to infer semantic constraints and then program synthesis to construct repairs conforming to them. While syntactic-based APR techniques have been shown successful on bugs in real-world programs written in both C and Java, semantics-based APR techniques mostly target C programs. This leaves empirical comparisons of the APR families not fully explored, and developers without a Java-based semantics APR technique. We present JFix, a semantics-based APR framework that targets Java, and an associated Eclipse plugin. JFix is implemented atop Symbolic PathFinder, a well-known symbolic execution engine for Java programs. It extends one particular APR technique (Angelix), and is designed to be sufficiently generic to support a variety of such techniques. We demonstrate that semantics-based APR can indeed efficiently and effectively repair a variety of classes of bugs in large real-world Java programs. This supports our claim that the framework can both support developers seeking semantics-based repair of bugs in Java programs, as well as enable larger scale empirical studies comparing syntactic- and semantics-based APR targeting Java. The demonstration of our tool is available via the project website at: https://xuanbachle.github.io/semanticsrepair/ }, author = {Le, Xuan and Chu, Duc Hiep and Lo, David and Le Goues, Claire and Visser, Willem}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis}, location = {Santa Barbara, CA, United States}, pages = {376 -- 379 }, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{JFIX: Semantics-based repair of Java programs via symbolic PathFinder}}, doi = {10.1145/3092703.3098225}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{950, abstract = {Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several common modes to determine how the players move the token through the graph; e.g., in turn-based games the players alternate turns in moving the token. We study the bidding mode of moving the token, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied in infinite-duration games. Both players have separate budgets, which sum up to $1$. In each turn, a bidding takes place. Both players submit bids simultaneously, and a bid is legal if it does not exceed the available budget. The winner of the bidding pays his bid to the other player and moves the token. For reachability objectives, repeated bidding games have been studied and are called Richman games. There, a central question is the existence and computation of threshold budgets; namely, a value t\in [0,1] such that if\PO's budget exceeds $t$, he can win the game, and if\PT's budget exceeds 1-t, he can win the game. We focus on parity games and mean-payoff games. We show the existence of threshold budgets in these games, and reduce the problem of finding them to Richman games. We also determine the strategy-complexity of an optimal strategy. Our most interesting result shows that memoryless strategies suffice for mean-payoff bidding games. }, author = {Avni, Guy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Chonev, Ventsislav K}, issn = {1868-8969}, location = {Berlin, Germany}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Infinite-duration bidding games}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2017.21}, volume = {85}, year = {2017}, } @phdthesis{1155, abstract = {This dissertation concerns the automatic verification of probabilistic systems and programs with arrays by statistical and logical methods. Although statistical and logical methods are different in nature, we show that they can be successfully combined for system analysis. In the first part of the dissertation we present a new statistical algorithm for the verification of probabilistic systems with respect to unbounded properties, including linear temporal logic. Our algorithm often performs faster than the previous approaches, and at the same time requires less information about the system. In addition, our method can be generalized to unbounded quantitative properties such as mean-payoff bounds. In the second part, we introduce two techniques for comparing probabilistic systems. Probabilistic systems are typically compared using the notion of equivalence, which requires the systems to have the equal probability of all behaviors. However, this notion is often too strict, since probabilities are typically only empirically estimated, and any imprecision may break the relation between processes. On the one hand, we propose to replace the Boolean notion of equivalence by a quantitative distance of similarity. For this purpose, we introduce a statistical framework for estimating distances between Markov chains based on their simulation runs, and we investigate which distances can be approximated in our framework. On the other hand, we propose to compare systems with respect to a new qualitative logic, which expresses that behaviors occur with probability one or a positive probability. This qualitative analysis is robust with respect to modeling errors and applicable to many domains. In the last part, we present a new quantifier-free logic for integer arrays, which allows us to express counting. Counting properties are prevalent in array-manipulating programs, however they cannot be expressed in the quantified fragments of the theory of arrays. We present a decision procedure for our logic, and provide several complexity results.}, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {163}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Statistical and logical methods for property checking}}, doi = {10.15479/AT:ISTA:TH_730}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{647, abstract = {Despite researchers’ efforts in the last couple of decades, reachability analysis is still a challenging problem even for linear hybrid systems. Among the existing approaches, the most practical ones are mainly based on bounded-time reachable set over-approximations. For the purpose of unbounded-time analysis, one important strategy is to abstract the original system and find an invariant for the abstraction. In this paper, we propose an approach to constructing a new kind of abstraction called conic abstraction for affine hybrid systems, and to computing reachable sets based on this abstraction. The essential feature of a conic abstraction is that it partitions the state space of a system into a set of convex polyhedral cones which is derived from a uniform conic partition of the derivative space. Such a set of polyhedral cones is able to cut all trajectories of the system into almost straight segments so that every segment of a reach pipe in a polyhedral cone tends to be straight as well, and hence can be over-approximated tightly by polyhedra using similar techniques as HyTech or PHAVer. In particular, for diagonalizable affine systems, our approach can guarantee to find an invariant for unbounded reachable sets, which is beyond the capability of bounded-time reachability analysis tools. We implemented the approach in a tool and experiments on benchmarks show that our approach is more powerful than SpaceEx and PHAVer in dealing with diagonalizable systems.}, author = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Giacobbe, Mirco and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kong, Hui}, isbn = {978-331965764-6}, location = {Berlin, Germany}, pages = {116 -- 132}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Conic abstractions for hybrid systems}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-65765-3_7}, volume = {10419 }, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{631, abstract = {Template polyhedra generalize intervals and octagons to polyhedra whose facets are orthogonal to a given set of arbitrary directions. They have been employed in the abstract interpretation of programs and, with particular success, in the reachability analysis of hybrid automata. While previously, the choice of directions has been left to the user or a heuristic, we present a method for the automatic discovery of directions that generalize and eliminate spurious counterexamples. We show that for the class of convex hybrid automata, i.e., hybrid automata with (possibly nonlinear) convex constraints on derivatives, such directions always exist and can be found using convex optimization. We embed our method inside a CEGAR loop, thus enabling the time-unbounded reachability analysis of an important and richer class of hybrid automata than was previously possible. We evaluate our method on several benchmarks, demonstrating also its superior efficiency for the special case of linear hybrid automata.}, author = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Frehse, Goran and Giacobbe, Mirco and Henzinger, Thomas A}, isbn = {978-366254576-8}, location = {Uppsala, Sweden}, pages = {589 -- 606}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Counterexample guided refinement of template polyhedra}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-54577-5_34}, volume = {10205}, year = {2017}, } @article{1407, abstract = {We consider the problem of computing the set of initial states of a dynamical system such that there exists a control strategy to ensure that the trajectories satisfy a temporal logic specification with probability 1 (almost-surely). We focus on discrete-time, stochastic linear dynamics and specifications given as formulas of the Generalized Reactivity(1) fragment of Linear Temporal Logic over linear predicates in the states of the system. We propose a solution based on iterative abstraction-refinement, and turn-based 2-player probabilistic games. While the theoretical guarantee of our algorithm after any finite number of iterations is only a partial solution, we show that if our algorithm terminates, then the result is the set of all satisfying initial states. Moreover, for any (partial) solution our algorithm synthesizes witness control strategies to ensure almost-sure satisfaction of the temporal logic specification. While the proposed algorithm guarantees progress and soundness in every iteration, it is computationally demanding. We offer an alternative, more efficient solution for the reachability properties that decomposes the problem into a series of smaller problems of the same type. All algorithms are demonstrated on an illustrative case study.}, author = {Svoreňová, Mária and Kretinsky, Jan and Chmelik, Martin and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Cěrná, Ivana and Belta, Cǎlin}, journal = {Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems}, number = {2}, pages = {230 -- 253}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Temporal logic control for stochastic linear systems using abstraction refinement of probabilistic games}}, doi = {10.1016/j.nahs.2016.04.006}, volume = {23}, year = {2017}, } @article{1338, abstract = {We present a computer-aided programming approach to concurrency. The approach allows programmers to program assuming a friendly, non-preemptive scheduler, and our synthesis procedure inserts synchronization to ensure that the final program works even with a preemptive scheduler. The correctness specification is implicit, inferred from the non-preemptive behavior. Let us consider sequences of calls that the program makes to an external interface. The specification requires that any such sequence produced under a preemptive scheduler should be included in the set of sequences produced under a non-preemptive scheduler. We guarantee that our synthesis does not introduce deadlocks and that the synchronization inserted is optimal w.r.t. a given objective function. The solution is based on a finitary abstraction, an algorithm for bounded language inclusion modulo an independence relation, and generation of a set of global constraints over synchronization placements. Each model of the global constraints set corresponds to a correctness-ensuring synchronization placement. The placement that is optimal w.r.t. the given objective function is chosen as the synchronization solution. We apply the approach to device-driver programming, where the driver threads call the software interface of the device and the API provided by the operating system. Our experiments demonstrate that our synthesis method is precise and efficient. The implicit specification helped us find one concurrency bug previously missed when model-checking using an explicit, user-provided specification. We implemented objective functions for coarse-grained and fine-grained locking and observed that different synchronization placements are produced for our experiments, favoring a minimal number of synchronization operations or maximum concurrency, respectively.}, author = {Cerny, Pavol and Clarke, Edmund and Henzinger, Thomas A and Radhakrishna, Arjun and Ryzhyk, Leonid and Samanta, Roopsha and Tarrach, Thorsten}, journal = {Formal Methods in System Design}, number = {2-3}, pages = {97 -- 139}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{From non-preemptive to preemptive scheduling using synchronization synthesis}}, doi = {10.1007/s10703-016-0256-5}, volume = {50}, year = {2017}, } @article{1351, abstract = {The behaviour of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is typically analysed using simulation-based statistical testing-like methods. In this paper, we demonstrate that we can replace this approach by a formal verification-like method that gives higher assurance and scalability. We focus on Wagner’s weighted GRN model with varying weights, which is used in evolutionary biology. In the model, weight parameters represent the gene interaction strength that may change due to genetic mutations. For a property of interest, we synthesise the constraints over the parameter space that represent the set of GRNs satisfying the property. We experimentally show that our parameter synthesis procedure computes the mutational robustness of GRNs—an important problem of interest in evolutionary biology—more efficiently than the classical simulation method. We specify the property in linear temporal logic. We employ symbolic bounded model checking and SMT solving to compute the space of GRNs that satisfy the property, which amounts to synthesizing a set of linear constraints on the weights.}, author = {Giacobbe, Mirco and Guet, Calin C and Gupta, Ashutosh and Henzinger, Thomas A and Paixao, Tiago and Petrov, Tatjana}, issn = {00015903}, journal = {Acta Informatica}, number = {8}, pages = {765 -- 787}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Model checking the evolution of gene regulatory networks}}, doi = {10.1007/s00236-016-0278-x}, volume = {54}, year = {2017}, } @article{1196, abstract = {We define the . model-measuring problem: given a model . M and specification . ϕ, what is the maximal distance . ρ such that all models . M' within distance . ρ from . M satisfy (or violate) . ϕ. The model-measuring problem presupposes a distance function on models. We concentrate on . automatic distance functions, which are defined by weighted automata. The model-measuring problem subsumes several generalizations of the classical model-checking problem, in particular, quantitative model-checking problems that measure the degree of satisfaction of a specification; robustness problems that measure how much a model can be perturbed without violating the specification; and parameter synthesis for hybrid systems. We show that for automatic distance functions, and (a) . ω-regular linear-time, (b) . ω-regular branching-time, and (c) hybrid specifications, the model-measuring problem can be solved.We use automata-theoretic model-checking methods for model measuring, replacing the emptiness question for word, tree, and hybrid automata by the . optimal-value question for the weighted versions of these automata. For automata over words and trees, we consider weighted automata that accumulate weights by maximizing, summing, discounting, and limit averaging. For hybrid automata, we consider monotonic (parametric) hybrid automata, a hybrid counterpart of (discrete) weighted automata.We give several examples of using the model-measuring problem to compute various notions of robustness and quantitative satisfaction for temporal specifications. Further, we propose the modeling framework for model measuring to ease the specification and reduce the likelihood of errors in modeling.Finally, we present a variant of the model-measuring problem, called the . model-repair problem. The model-repair problem applies to models that do not satisfy the specification; it can be used to derive restrictions, under which the model satisfies the specification, i.e., to repair the model.}, author = {Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, journal = {Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems}, pages = {166 -- 190}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Model measuring for discrete and hybrid systems}}, doi = {10.1016/j.nahs.2016.09.001}, volume = {23}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{1116, abstract = {Time-triggered switched networks are a deterministic communication infrastructure used by real-time distributed embedded systems. Due to the criticality of the applications running over them, developers need to ensure that end-to-end communication is dependable and predictable. Traditional approaches assume static networks that are not flexible to changes caused by reconfigurations or, more importantly, faults, which are dealt with in the application using redundancy. We adopt the concept of handling faults in the switches from non-real-time networks while maintaining the required predictability. We study a class of forwarding schemes that can handle various types of failures. We consider probabilistic failures. We study a class of forwarding schemes that can handle various types of failures. We consider probabilistic failures. For a given network with a forwarding scheme and a constant ℓ, we compute the {\em score} of the scheme, namely the probability (induced by faults) that at least ℓ messages arrive on time. We reduce the scoring problem to a reachability problem on a Markov chain with a "product-like" structure. Its special structure allows us to reason about it symbolically, and reduce the scoring problem to #SAT. Our solution is generic and can be adapted to different networks and other contexts. Also, we show the computational complexity of the scoring problem is #P-complete, and we study methods to estimate the score. We evaluate the effectiveness of our techniques with an implementation. }, author = {Avni, Guy and Goel, Shubham and Henzinger, Thomas A and Rodríguez Navas, Guillermo}, issn = {03029743}, location = {Uppsala, Sweden}, pages = {169 -- 187}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Computing scores of forwarding schemes in switched networks with probabilistic faults}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-54580-5_10}, volume = {10206}, year = {2017}, } @article{1066, abstract = {Simulation is an attractive alternative to language inclusion for automata as it is an under-approximation of language inclusion, but usually has much lower complexity. Simulation has also been extended in two orthogonal directions, namely, (1) fair simulation, for simulation over specified set of infinite runs; and (2) quantitative simulation, for simulation between weighted automata. While fair trace inclusion is PSPACE-complete, fair simulation can be computed in polynomial time. For weighted automata, the (quantitative) language inclusion problem is undecidable in general, whereas the (quantitative) simulation reduces to quantitative games, which admit pseudo-polynomial time algorithms. In this work, we study (quantitative) simulation for weighted automata with Büchi acceptance conditions, i.e., we generalize fair simulation from non-weighted automata to weighted automata. We show that imposing Büchi acceptance conditions on weighted automata changes many fundamental properties of the simulation games, yet they still admit pseudo-polynomial time algorithms.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan and Velner, Yaron}, journal = {Information and Computation}, number = {2}, pages = {143 -- 166}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Quantitative fair simulation games}}, doi = {10.1016/j.ic.2016.10.006}, volume = {254}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{1011, abstract = {Pushdown systems (PDSs) and recursive state machines (RSMs), which are linearly equivalent, are standard models for interprocedural analysis. Yet RSMs are more convenient as they (a) explicitly model function calls and returns, and (b) specify many natural parameters for algorithmic analysis, e.g., the number of entries and exits. We consider a general framework where RSM transitions are labeled from a semiring and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations, which can model, e.g., interprocedural reachability and dataflow analysis problems. Our main contributions are new algorithms for several fundamental problems. As compared to a direct translation of RSMs to PDSs and the best-known existing bounds of PDSs, our analysis algorithm improves the complexity for finite-height semirings (that subsumes reachability and standard dataflow properties). We further consider the problem of extracting distance values from the representation structures computed by our algorithm, and give efficient algorithms that distinguish the complexity of a one-time preprocessing from the complexity of each individual query. Another advantage of our algorithm is that our improvements carry over to the concurrent setting, where we improve the bestknown complexity for the context-bounded analysis of concurrent RSMs. Finally, we provide a prototype implementation that gives a significant speed-up on several benchmarks from the SLAM/SDV project.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Kragl, Bernhard and Mishra, Samarth and Pavlogiannis, Andreas}, editor = {Yang, Hongseok}, issn = {03029743}, location = {Uppsala, Sweden}, pages = {287 -- 313}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Faster algorithms for weighted recursive state machines}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-54434-1_11}, volume = {10201}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{1003, abstract = {Network games (NGs) are played on directed graphs and are extensively used in network design and analysis. Search problems for NGs include finding special strategy profiles such as a Nash equilibrium and a globally optimal solution. The networks modeled by NGs may be huge. In formal verification, abstraction has proven to be an extremely effective technique for reasoning about systems with big and even infinite state spaces. We describe an abstraction-refinement methodology for reasoning about NGs. Our methodology is based on an abstraction function that maps the state space of an NG to a much smaller state space. We search for a global optimum and a Nash equilibrium by reasoning on an under- and an overapproximation defined on top of this smaller state space. When the approximations are too coarse to find such profiles, we refine the abstraction function. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the methodology.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Guha, Shibashis and Kupferman, Orna}, issn = {10450823}, location = {Melbourne, Australia}, pages = {70 -- 76}, publisher = {AAAI Press}, title = {{An abstraction-refinement methodology for reasoning about network games}}, doi = {10.24963/ijcai.2017/11}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{962, abstract = {We present a new algorithm for model counting of a class of string constraints. In addition to the classic operation of concatenation, our class includes some recursively defined operations such as Kleene closure, and replacement of substrings. Additionally, our class also includes length constraints on the string expressions, which means, by requiring reasoning about numbers, that we face a multi-sorted logic. In the end, our string constraints are motivated by their use in programming for web applications. Our algorithm comprises two novel features: the ability to use a technique of (1) partial derivatives for constraints that are already in a solved form, i.e. a form where its (string) satisfiability is clearly displayed, and (2) non-progression, where cyclic reasoning in the reduction process may be terminated (thus allowing for the algorithm to look elsewhere). Finally, we experimentally compare our model counter with two recent works on model counting of similar constraints, SMC [18] and ABC [5], to demonstrate its superior performance.}, author = {Trinh, Minh and Chu, Duc Hiep and Jaffar, Joxan}, editor = {Majumdar, Rupak and Kunčak, Viktor}, issn = {03029743}, location = {Heidelberg, Germany}, pages = {399 -- 418}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Model counting for recursively-defined strings}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-63390-9_21}, volume = {10427}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{942, abstract = {A notable class of techniques for automatic program repair is known as semantics-based. Such techniques, e.g., Angelix, infer semantic specifications via symbolic execution, and then use program synthesis to construct new code that satisfies those inferred specifications. However, the obtained specifications are naturally incomplete, leaving the synthesis engine with a difficult task of synthesizing a general solution from a sparse space of many possible solutions that are consistent with the provided specifications but that do not necessarily generalize. We present S3, a new repair synthesis engine that leverages programming-by-examples methodology to synthesize high-quality bug repairs. The novelty in S3 that allows it to tackle the sparse search space to create more general repairs is three-fold: (1) A systematic way to customize and constrain the syntactic search space via a domain-specific language, (2) An efficient enumeration-based search strategy over the constrained search space, and (3) A number of ranking features based on measures of the syntactic and semantic distances between candidate solutions and the original buggy program. We compare S3’s repair effectiveness with state-of-the-art synthesis engines Angelix, Enumerative, and CVC4. S3 can successfully and correctly fix at least three times more bugs than the best baseline on datasets of 52 bugs in small programs, and 100 bugs in real-world large programs. }, author = {Le, Xuan and Chu, Duc Hiep and Lo, David and Le Goues, Claire and Visser, Willem}, isbn = {978-145035105-8}, location = {Paderborn, Germany}, pages = {593 -- 604}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{S3: Syntax- and semantic-guided repair synthesis via programming by examples}}, doi = {10.1145/3106237.3106309}, volume = {F130154}, year = {2017}, } @article{743, abstract = {This special issue of the Journal on Formal Methods in System Design is dedicated to Prof. Helmut Veith, who unexpectedly passed away in March 2016. Helmut Veith was a brilliant researcher, inspiring collaborator, passionate mentor, generous friend, and valued member of the formal methods community. Helmut was not only known for his numerous and influential contributions in the field of automated verification (most prominently his work on Counterexample-Guided Abstraction Refinement [1,2]), but also for his untiring and passionate efforts for the logic community: he co-organized the Vienna Summer of Logic (an event comprising twelve conferences and numerous workshops which attracted thousands of researchers from all over the world), he initiated the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (which promotes international collaboration on logic and algorithms and organizes outreach events such as the LogicLounge), and he coordinated the Doctoral Program on Logical Methods in Computer Science at TU Wien (currently educating more than 40 doctoral students) and a National Research Network on Rigorous Systems Engineering (uniting fifteen researchers in Austria to address the challenge of building reliable and safe computer systems). With his enthusiasm and commitment, Helmut completely reshaped the Austrian research landscape in the field of logic and verification in his few years as a full professor at TU Wien.}, author = {Gottlob, Georg and Henzinger, Thomas A and Weißenbacher, Georg}, journal = {Formal Methods in System Design}, number = {2}, pages = {267 -- 269}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Preface of the special issue in memoriam Helmut Veith}}, doi = {10.1007/s10703-017-0307-6}, volume = {51}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{549, abstract = {Model checking is usually based on a comprehensive traversal of the state space. Causality-based model checking is a radically different approach that instead analyzes the cause-effect relationships in a program. We give an overview on a new class of model checking algorithms that capture the causal relationships in a special data structure called concurrent traces. Concurrent traces identify key events in an execution history and link them through their cause-effect relationships. The model checker builds a tableau of concurrent traces, where the case splits represent different causal explanations of a hypothetical error. Causality-based model checking has been implemented in the ARCTOR tool, and applied to previously intractable multi-threaded benchmarks.}, author = {Finkbeiner, Bernd and Kupriyanov, Andrey}, booktitle = {Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science}, issn = {2075-2180}, location = {Uppsala, Sweden}, pages = {31 -- 38}, publisher = {Open Publishing Association}, title = {{Causality-based model checking}}, doi = {10.4204/EPTCS.259.3}, volume = {259}, year = {2017}, } @inproceedings{1090, abstract = { While weighted automata provide a natural framework to express quantitative properties, many basic properties like average response time cannot be expressed with weighted automata. Nested weighted automata extend weighted automata and consist of a master automaton and a set of slave automata that are invoked by the master automaton. Nested weighted automata are strictly more expressive than weighted automata (e.g., average response time can be expressed with nested weighted automata), but the basic decision questions have higher complexity (e.g., for deterministic automata, the emptiness question for nested weighted automata is PSPACE-hard, whereas the corresponding complexity for weighted automata is PTIME). We consider a natural subclass of nested weighted automata where at any point at most a bounded number k of slave automata can be active. We focus on automata whose master value function is the limit average. We show that these nested weighted automata with bounded width are strictly more expressive than weighted automata (e.g., average response time with no overlapping requests can be expressed with bound k=1, but not with non-nested weighted automata). We show that the complexity of the basic decision problems (i.e., emptiness and universality) for the subclass with k constant matches the complexity for weighted automata. Moreover, when k is part of the input given in unary we establish PSPACE-completeness.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, location = {Krakow; Poland}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Nested weighted limit-average automata of bounded width}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2016.24}, volume = {58}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1095, abstract = { The semantics of concurrent data structures is usually given by a sequential specification and a consistency condition. Linearizability is the most popular consistency condition due to its simplicity and general applicability. Nevertheless, for applications that do not require all guarantees offered by linearizability, recent research has focused on improving performance and scalability of concurrent data structures by relaxing their semantics. In this paper, we present local linearizability, a relaxed consistency condition that is applicable to container-type concurrent data structures like pools, queues, and stacks. While linearizability requires that the effect of each operation is observed by all threads at the same time, local linearizability only requires that for each thread T, the effects of its local insertion operations and the effects of those removal operations that remove values inserted by T are observed by all threads at the same time. We investigate theoretical and practical properties of local linearizability and its relationship to many existing consistency conditions. We present a generic implementation method for locally linearizable data structures that uses existing linearizable data structures as building blocks. Our implementations show performance and scalability improvements over the original building blocks and outperform the fastest existing container-type implementations. }, author = {Haas, Andreas and Henzinger, Thomas A and Holzer, Andreas and Kirsch, Christoph and Lippautz, Michael and Payer, Hannes and Sezgin, Ali and Sokolova, Ana and Veith, Helmut}, booktitle = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics}, location = {Quebec City; Canada}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Local linearizability for concurrent container-type data structures}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.6}, volume = {59}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1103, abstract = {We propose two parallel state-space-exploration algorithms for hybrid automaton (HA), with the goal of enhancing performance on multi-core shared-memory systems. The first uses the parallel, breadth-first-search algorithm (PBFS) of the SPIN model checker, when traversing the discrete modes of the HA, and enhances it with a parallel exploration of the continuous states within each mode. We show that this simple-minded extension of PBFS does not provide the desired load balancing in many HA benchmarks. The second algorithm is a task-parallel BFS algorithm (TP-BFS), which uses a cheap precomputation of the cost associated with the post operations (both continuous and discrete) in order to improve load balancing. We illustrate the TP-BFS and the cost precomputation of the post operators on a support-function-based algorithm for state-space exploration. The performance comparison of the two algorithms shows that, in general, TP-BFS provides a better utilization/load-balancing of the CPU. Both algorithms are implemented in the model checker XSpeed. Our experiments show a maximum speed-up of more than 2000 χ on a navigation benchmark, with respect to SpaceEx LGG scenario. In order to make the comparison fair, we employed an equal number of post operations in both tools. To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first attempt to provide parallel, reachability-analysis algorithms for HA.}, author = {Gurung, Amit and Deka, Arup and Bartocci, Ezio and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Grosu, Radu and Ray, Rajarshi}, location = {Kanpur, India }, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Parallel reachability analysis for hybrid systems}}, doi = {10.1109/MEMCOD.2016.7797741}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1135, abstract = {Time-triggered (TT) switched networks are a deterministic communication infrastructure used by real-time distributed embedded systems. These networks rely on the notion of globally discretized time (i.e. time slots) and a static TT schedule that prescribes which message is sent through which link at every time slot, such that all messages reach their destination before a global timeout. These schedules are generated offline, assuming a static network with fault-free links, and entrusting all error-handling functions to the end user. Assuming the network is static is an over-optimistic view, and indeed links tend to fail in practice. We study synthesis of TT schedules on a network in which links fail over time and we assume the switches run a very simple error-recovery protocol once they detect a crashed link. We address the problem of finding a pk; qresistant schedule; namely, one that, assuming the switches run a fixed error-recovery protocol, guarantees that the number of messages that arrive at their destination by the timeout is at least no matter what sequence of at most k links fail. Thus, we maintain the simplicity of the switches while giving a guarantee on the number of messages that meet the timeout. We show how a pk; q-resistant schedule can be obtained using a CEGAR-like approach: find a schedule, decide whether it is pk; q-resistant, and if it is not, use the witnessing fault sequence to generate a constraint that is added to the program. The newly added constraint disallows the schedule to be regenerated in a future iteration while also eliminating several other schedules that are not pk; q-resistant. We illustrate the applicability of our approach using an SMT-based implementation. © 2016 ACM.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Guha, Shibashis and Rodríguez Navas, Guillermo}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Embedded Software }, location = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{Synthesizing time triggered schedules for switched networks with faulty links}}, doi = {10.1145/2968478.2968499}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1134, abstract = {Hybrid systems have both continuous and discrete dynamics and are useful for modeling a variety of control systems, from air traffic control protocols to robotic maneuvers and beyond. Recently, numerous powerful and scalable tools for analyzing hybrid systems have emerged. Several of these tools implement automated formal methods for mathematically proving a system meets a specification. This tutorial session will present three recent hybrid systems tools: C2E2, HyST, and TuLiP. C2E2 is a simulated-based verification tool for hybrid systems, and uses validated numerical solvers and bloating of simulation traces to verify systems meet specifications. HyST is a hybrid systems model transformation and translation tool, and uses a canonical intermediate representation to support most of the recent verification tools, as well as automated sound abstractions that simplify verification of a given hybrid system. TuLiP is a controller synthesis tool for hybrid systems, where given a temporal logic specification to be satisfied for a system (plant) model, TuLiP will find a controller that meets a given specification. © 2016 IEEE.}, author = {Duggirala, Parasara and Fan, Chuchu and Potok, Matthew and Qi, Bolun and Mitra, Sayan and Viswanathan, Mahesh and Bak, Stanley and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Johnson, Taylor and Nguyen, Luan and Schilling, Christian and Sogokon, Andrew and Tran, Hoang and Xiang, Weiming}, booktitle = {2016 IEEE Conference on Control Applications}, location = {Buenos Aires, Argentina }, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Tutorial: Software tools for hybrid systems verification transformation and synthesis C2E2 HyST and TuLiP}}, doi = {10.1109/CCA.2016.7587948}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1138, abstract = {Automata with monitor counters, where the transitions do not depend on counter values, and nested weighted automata are two expressive automata-theoretic frameworks for quantitative properties. For a well-studied and wide class of quantitative functions, we establish that automata with monitor counters and nested weighted automata are equivalent. We study for the first time such quantitative automata under probabilistic semantics. We show that several problems that are undecidable for the classical questions of emptiness and universality become decidable under the probabilistic semantics. We present a complete picture of decidability for such automata, and even an almost-complete picture of computational complexity, for the probabilistic questions we consider. © 2016 ACM.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium}, location = {New York, NY, USA}, pages = {76 -- 85}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Quantitative automata under probabilistic semantics}}, doi = {10.1145/2933575.2933588}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1227, abstract = {Many biological systems can be modeled as multiaffine hybrid systems. Due to the nonlinearity of multiaffine systems, it is difficult to verify their properties of interest directly. A common strategy to tackle this problem is to construct and analyze a discrete overapproximation of the original system. However, the conservativeness of a discrete abstraction significantly determines the level of confidence we can have in the properties of the original system. In this paper, in order to reduce the conservativeness of a discrete abstraction, we propose a new method based on a sufficient and necessary decision condition for computing discrete transitions between states in the abstract system. We assume the state space partition of a multiaffine system to be based on a set of multivariate polynomials. Hence, a rectangular partition defined in terms of polynomials of the form (xi − c) is just a simple case of multivariate polynomial partition, and the new decision condition applies naturally. We analyze and demonstrate the improvement of our method over the existing methods using some examples.}, author = {Kong, Hui and Bartocci, Ezio and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Grosu, Radu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Jiang, Yu and Schilling, Christian}, location = {Grenoble, France}, pages = {128 -- 144}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Discrete abstraction of multiaffine systems}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-47151-8_9}, volume = {9957}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1256, abstract = {Simulink is widely used for model driven development (MDD) of industrial software systems. Typically, the Simulink based development is initiated from Stateflow modeling, followed by simulation, validation and code generation mapped to physical execution platforms. However, recent industrial trends have raised the demands of rigorous verification on safety-critical applications, which is unfortunately challenging for Simulink. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge the Stateflow based model driven development and a well- defined rigorous verification. First, we develop a self- contained toolkit to translate Stateflow model into timed automata, where major advanced modeling features in Stateflow are supported. Taking advantage of the strong verification capability of Uppaal, we can not only find bugs in Stateflow models which are missed by Simulink Design Verifier, but also check more important temporal properties. Next, we customize a runtime verifier for the generated nonintrusive VHDL and C code of Stateflow model for monitoring. The major strength of the customization is the flexibility to collect and analyze runtime properties with a pure software monitor, which opens more opportunities for engineers to achieve high reliability of the target system compared with the traditional act that only relies on Simulink Polyspace. We incorporate these two parts into original Stateflow based MDD seamlessly. In this way, safety-critical properties are both verified at the model level, and at the consistent system implementation level with physical execution environment in consideration. We apply our approach on a train controller design, and the verified implementation is tested and deployed on a real hardware platform.}, author = {Jiang, Yu and Yang, Yixiao and Liu, Han and Kong, Hui and Gu, Ming and Sun, Jiaguang and Sha, Lui}, location = {Vienna, Austria}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{From stateflow simulation to verified implementation: A verification approach and a real-time train controller design}}, doi = {10.1109/RTAS.2016.7461337}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1335, abstract = {In this paper we review various automata-theoretic formalisms for expressing quantitative properties. We start with finite-state Boolean automata that express the traditional regular properties. We then consider weighted ω-automata that can measure the average density of events, which finite-state Boolean automata cannot. However, even weighted ω-automata cannot express basic performance properties like average response time. We finally consider two formalisms of weighted ω-automata with monitors, where the monitors are either (a) counters or (b) weighted automata themselves. We present a translation result to establish that these two formalisms are equivalent. Weighted ω-automata with monitors generalize weighted ω-automata, and can express average response time property. They present a natural, robust, and expressive framework for quantitative specifications, with important decidable properties.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan}, location = {Edinburgh, United Kingdom}, pages = {23 -- 38}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Quantitative monitor automata}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-53413-7_2}, volume = {9837}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1390, abstract = {The goal of automatic program repair is to identify a set of syntactic changes that can turn a program that is incorrect with respect to a given specification into a correct one. Existing program repair techniques typically aim to find any program that meets the given specification. Such “best-effort” strategies can end up generating a program that is quite different from the original one. Novel techniques have been proposed to compute syntactically minimal program fixes, but the smallest syntactic fix to a program can still significantly alter the original program’s behaviour. We propose a new approach to program repair based on program distances, which can quantify changes not only to the program syntax but also to the program semantics. We call this the quantitative program repair problem where the “optimal” repair is derived using multiple distances. We implement a solution to the quantitative repair problem in a prototype tool called Qlose (Quantitatively close), using the program synthesizer Sketch. We evaluate the effectiveness of different distances in obtaining desirable repairs by evaluating Qlose on programs taken from educational tools such as CodeHunt and edX.}, author = {D'Antoni, Loris and Samanta, Roopsha and Singh, Rishabh}, location = {Toronto, Canada}, pages = {383 -- 401}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{QLOSE: Program repair with quantitative objectives}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-41540-6_21}, volume = {9780}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1421, abstract = {Hybridization methods enable the analysis of hybrid automata with complex, nonlinear dynamics through a sound abstraction process. Complex dynamics are converted to simpler ones with added noise, and then analysis is done using a reachability method for the simpler dynamics. Several such recent approaches advocate that only "dynamic" hybridization techniquesi.e., those where the dynamics are abstracted on-The-fly during a reachability computation are effective. In this paper, we demonstrate this is not the case, and create static hybridization methods that are more scalable than earlier approaches. The main insight in our approach is that quick, numeric simulations can be used to guide the process, eliminating the need for an exponential number of hybridization domains. Transitions between domains are generally timetriggered, avoiding accumulated error from geometric intersections. We enhance our static technique by combining time-Triggered transitions with occasional space-Triggered transitions, and demonstrate the benefits of the combined approach in what we call mixed-Triggered hybridization. Finally, error modes are inserted to confirm that the reachable states stay within the hybridized regions. The developed techniques can scale to higher dimensions than previous static approaches, while enabling the parallelization of the main performance bottleneck for many dynamic hybridization approaches: The nonlinear optimization required for sound dynamics abstraction. We implement our method as a model transformation pass in the HYST tool, and perform reachability analysis and evaluation using an unmodified version of SpaceEx on nonlinear models with up to six dimensions.}, author = {Bak, Stanley and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Johnson, Taylor and Prakash, Pradyot}, location = {Vienna, Austria}, pages = {155 -- 164}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Scalable static hybridization methods for analysis of nonlinear systems}}, doi = {10.1145/2883817.2883837}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1439, abstract = {Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. We introduce PSYNC, a domain specific language based on the Heard-Of model, which views asynchronous faulty systems as synchronous ones with an adversarial environment that simulates asynchrony and faults by dropping messages. We define a runtime system for PSYNC that efficiently executes on asynchronous networks. We formalize the relation between the runtime system and PSYNC in terms of observational refinement. The high-level lockstep abstraction introduced by PSYNC simplifies the design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed algorithms and enables automated formal verification. We have implemented an embedding of PSYNC in the SCALA programming language with a runtime system for asynchronous networks. We show the applicability of PSYNC by implementing several important fault-tolerant distributed algorithms and we compare the implementation of consensus algorithms in PSYNC against implementations in other languages in terms of code size, runtime efficiency, and verification.}, author = {Dragoi, Cezara and Henzinger, Thomas A and Zufferey, Damien}, location = {St. Petersburg, FL, USA}, pages = {400 -- 415}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {{PSYNC: A partially synchronous language for fault-tolerant distributed algorithms}}, doi = {10.1145/2837614.2837650}, volume = {20-22}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1524, abstract = {When designing genetic circuits, the typical primitives used in major existing modelling formalisms are gene interaction graphs, where edges between genes denote either an activation or inhibition relation. However, when designing experiments, it is important to be precise about the low-level mechanistic details as to how each such relation is implemented. The rule-based modelling language Kappa allows to unambiguously specify mechanistic details such as DNA binding sites, dimerisation of transcription factors, or co-operative interactions. Such a detailed description comes with complexity and computationally costly executions. We propose a general method for automatically transforming a rule-based program, by eliminating intermediate species and adjusting the rate constants accordingly. To the best of our knowledge, we show the first automated reduction of rule-based models based on equilibrium approximations. Our algorithm is an adaptation of an existing algorithm, which was designed for reducing reaction-based programs; our version of the algorithm scans the rule-based Kappa model in search for those interaction patterns known to be amenable to equilibrium approximations (e.g. Michaelis-Menten scheme). Additional checks are then performed in order to verify if the reduction is meaningful in the context of the full model. The reduced model is efficiently obtained by static inspection over the rule-set. The tool is tested on a detailed rule-based model of a λ-phage switch, which lists 92 rules and 13 agents. The reduced model has 11 rules and 5 agents, and provides a dramatic reduction in simulation time of several orders of magnitude.}, author = {Beica, Andreea and Guet, Calin C and Petrov, Tatjana}, location = {Madrid, Spain}, pages = {173 -- 191}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Efficient reduction of kappa models by static inspection of the rule-set}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-26916-0_10}, volume = {9271}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1526, abstract = {We present the first study of robustness of systems that are both timed as well as reactive (I/O). We study the behavior of such timed I/O systems in the presence of uncertain inputs and formalize their robustness using the analytic notion of Lipschitz continuity: a timed I/O system is K-(Lipschitz) robust if the perturbation in its output is at most K times the perturbation in its input. We quantify input and output perturbation using similarity functions over timed words such as the timed version of the Manhattan distance and the Skorokhod distance. We consider two models of timed I/O systems — timed transducers and asynchronous sequential circuits. We show that K-robustness of timed transducers can be decided in polynomial space under certain conditions. For asynchronous sequential circuits, we reduce K-robustness w.r.t. timed Manhattan distances to K-robustness of discrete letter-to-letter transducers and show PSpace-completeness of the problem.}, author = {Henzinger, Thomas A and Otop, Jan and Samanta, Roopsha}, location = {St. Petersburg, FL, USA}, pages = {250 -- 267}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Lipschitz robustness of timed I/O systems}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-49122-5_12}, volume = {9583}, year = {2016}, } @article{1148, abstract = {Continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) models have become a central tool for understanding the dynamics of complex reaction networks and the importance of stochasticity in the underlying biochemical processes. When such models are employed to answer questions in applications, in order to ensure that the model provides a sufficiently accurate representation of the real system, it is of vital importance that the model parameters are inferred from real measured data. This, however, is often a formidable task and all of the existing methods fail in one case or the other, usually because the underlying CTMC model is high-dimensional and computationally difficult to analyze. The parameter inference methods that tend to scale best in the dimension of the CTMC are based on so-called moment closure approximations. However, there exists a large number of different moment closure approximations and it is typically hard to say a priori which of the approximations is the most suitable for the inference procedure. Here, we propose a moment-based parameter inference method that automatically chooses the most appropriate moment closure method. Accordingly, contrary to existing methods, the user is not required to be experienced in moment closure techniques. In addition to that, our method adaptively changes the approximation during the parameter inference to ensure that always the best approximation is used, even in cases where different approximations are best in different regions of the parameter space. © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd}, author = {Schilling, Christian and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Podelski, Andreas and Ruess, Jakob}, journal = {Biosystems}, pages = {15 -- 25}, publisher = {Elsevier}, title = {{Adaptive moment closure for parameter inference of biochemical reaction networks}}, doi = {10.1016/j.biosystems.2016.07.005}, volume = {149}, year = {2016}, } @article{1705, abstract = {Hybrid systems represent an important and powerful formalism for modeling real-world applications such as embedded systems. A verification tool like SpaceEx is based on the exploration of a symbolic search space (the region space). As a verification tool, it is typically optimized towards proving the absence of errors. In some settings, e.g., when the verification tool is employed in a feedback-directed design cycle, one would like to have the option to call a version that is optimized towards finding an error trajectory in the region space. A recent approach in this direction is based on guided search. Guided search relies on a cost function that indicates which states are promising to be explored, and preferably explores more promising states first. In this paper, we propose an abstraction-based cost function based on coarse-grained space abstractions for guiding the reachability analysis. For this purpose, a suitable abstraction technique that exploits the flexible granularity of modern reachability analysis algorithms is introduced. The new cost function is an effective extension of pattern database approaches that have been successfully applied in other areas. The approach has been implemented in the SpaceEx model checker. The evaluation shows its practical potential.}, author = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Donzé, Alexandre and Frehse, Goran and Grosu, Radu and Johnson, Taylor and Ladan, Hamed and Podelski, Andreas and Wehrle, Martin}, journal = {International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer}, number = {4}, pages = {449 -- 467}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Guided search for hybrid systems based on coarse-grained space abstractions}}, doi = {10.1007/s10009-015-0393-y}, volume = {18}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{479, abstract = {Clinical guidelines and decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in daily practices of medicine. Many text-based guidelines have been encoded for work-flow simulation of DSS to automate health care. During the collaboration with Carle hospital to develop a DSS, we identify that, for some complex and life-critical diseases, it is highly desirable to automatically rigorously verify some complex temporal properties in guidelines, which brings new challenges to current simulation based DSS with limited support of automatical formal verification and real-time data analysis. In this paper, we conduct the first study on applying runtime verification to cooperate with current DSS based on real-time data. Within the proposed technique, a user-friendly domain specific language, named DRTV, is designed to specify vital real-time data sampled by medical devices and temporal properties originated from clinical guidelines. Some interfaces are developed for data acquisition and communication. Then, for medical practice scenarios described in DRTV model, we will automatically generate event sequences and runtime property verifier automata. If a temporal property violates, real-time warnings will be produced by the formal verifier and passed to medical DSS. We have used DRTV to specify different kinds of medical care scenarios, and applied the proposed technique to assist existing DSS. As presented in experiment results, in terms of warning detection, it outperforms the only use of DSS or human inspection, and improves the quality of clinical health care of hospital}, author = {Jiang, Yu and Liu, Han and Kong, Hui and Wang, Rui and Hosseini, Mohamad and Sun, Jiaguang and Sha, Lui}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion }, location = {Austin, TX, USA}, pages = {112 -- 121}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {{Use runtime verification to improve the quality of medical care practice}}, doi = {10.1145/2889160.2889233}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1166, abstract = {POMDPs are standard models for probabilistic planning problems, where an agent interacts with an uncertain environment. We study the problem of almost-sure reachability, where given a set of target states, the question is to decide whether there is a policy to ensure that the target set is reached with probability 1 (almost-surely). While in general the problem is EXPTIMEcomplete, in many practical cases policies with a small amount of memory suffice. Moreover, the existing solution to the problem is explicit, which first requires to construct explicitly an exponential reduction to a belief-support MDP. In this work, we first study the existence of observation-stationary strategies, which is NP-complete, and then small-memory strategies. We present a symbolic algorithm by an efficient encoding to SAT and using a SAT solver for the problem. We report experimental results demonstrating the scalability of our symbolic (SAT-based) approach. © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.}, author = {Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Chmelik, Martin and Davies, Jessica}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, location = {Phoenix, AZ, USA}, pages = {3225 -- 3232}, publisher = {AAAI Press}, title = {{A symbolic SAT based algorithm for almost sure reachability with small strategies in pomdps}}, volume = {2016}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1341, abstract = {In resource allocation games, selfish players share resources that are needed in order to fulfill their objectives. The cost of using a resource depends on the load on it. In the traditional setting, the players make their choices concurrently and in one-shot. That is, a strategy for a player is a subset of the resources. We introduce and study dynamic resource allocation games. In this setting, the game proceeds in phases. In each phase each player chooses one resource. A scheduler dictates the order in which the players proceed in a phase, possibly scheduling several players to proceed concurrently. The game ends when each player has collected a set of resources that fulfills his objective. The cost for each player then depends on this set as well as on the load on the resources in it – we consider both congestion and cost-sharing games. We argue that the dynamic setting is the suitable setting for many applications in practice. We study the stability of dynamic resource allocation games, where the appropriate notion of stability is that of subgame perfect equilibrium, study the inefficiency incurred due to selfish behavior, and also study problems that are particular to the dynamic setting, like constraints on the order in which resources can be chosen or the problem of finding a scheduler that achieves stability.}, author = {Avni, Guy and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kupferman, Orna}, location = {Liverpool, United Kingdom}, pages = {153 -- 166}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Dynamic resource allocation games}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-53354-3_13}, volume = {9928}, year = {2016}, } @phdthesis{1130, abstract = {In this thesis we present a computer-aided programming approach to concurrency. Our approach helps the programmer by automatically fixing concurrency-related bugs, i.e. bugs that occur when the program is executed using an aggressive preemptive scheduler, but not when using a non-preemptive (cooperative) scheduler. Bugs are program behaviours that are incorrect w.r.t. a specification. We consider both user-provided explicit specifications in the form of assertion statements in the code as well as an implicit specification. The implicit specification is inferred from the non-preemptive behaviour. Let us consider sequences of calls that the program makes to an external interface. The implicit specification requires that any such sequence produced under a preemptive scheduler should be included in the set of sequences produced under a non-preemptive scheduler. We consider several semantics-preserving fixes that go beyond atomic sections typically explored in the synchronisation synthesis literature. Our synthesis is able to place locks, barriers and wait-signal statements and last, but not least reorder independent statements. The latter may be useful if a thread is released to early, e.g., before some initialisation is completed. We guarantee that our synthesis does not introduce deadlocks and that the synchronisation inserted is optimal w.r.t. a given objective function. We dub our solution trace-based synchronisation synthesis and it is loosely based on counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). The synthesis works by discovering a trace that is incorrect w.r.t. the specification and identifying ordering constraints crucial to trigger the specification violation. Synchronisation may be placed immediately (greedy approach) or delayed until all incorrect traces are found (non-greedy approach). For the non-greedy approach we construct a set of global constraints over synchronisation placements. Each model of the global constraints set corresponds to a correctness-ensuring synchronisation placement. The placement that is optimal w.r.t. the given objective function is chosen as the synchronisation solution. We evaluate our approach on a number of realistic (albeit simplified) Linux device-driver benchmarks. The benchmarks are versions of the drivers with known concurrency-related bugs. For the experiments with an explicit specification we added assertions that would detect the bugs in the experiments. Device drivers lend themselves to implicit specification, where the device and the operating system are the external interfaces. Our experiments demonstrate that our synthesis method is precise and efficient. We implemented objective functions for coarse-grained and fine-grained locking and observed that different synchronisation placements are produced for our experiments, favouring e.g. a minimal number of synchronisation operations or maximum concurrency.}, author = {Tarrach, Thorsten}, issn = {2663-337X}, pages = {151}, publisher = {Institute of Science and Technology Austria}, title = {{Automatic synthesis of synchronisation primitives for concurrent programs}}, doi = {10.15479/at:ista:1130}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1093, abstract = {We introduce a general class of distances (metrics) between Markov chains, which are based on linear behaviour. This class encompasses distances given topologically (such as the total variation distance or trace distance) as well as by temporal logics or automata. We investigate which of the distances can be approximated by observing the systems, i.e. by black-box testing or simulation, and we provide both negative and positive results. }, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kretinsky, Jan and Petrov, Tatjana}, location = {Quebec City; Canada}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Linear distances between Markov chains}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2016.20}, volume = {59}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1234, abstract = {We present a new algorithm for the statistical model checking of Markov chains with respect to unbounded temporal properties, including full linear temporal logic. The main idea is that we monitor each simulation run on the fly, in order to detect quickly if a bottom strongly connected component is entered with high probability, in which case the simulation run can be terminated early. As a result, our simulation runs are often much shorter than required by termination bounds that are computed a priori for a desired level of confidence on a large state space. In comparison to previous algorithms for statistical model checking our method is not only faster in many cases but also requires less information about the system, namely, only the minimum transition probability that occurs in the Markov chain. In addition, our method can be generalised to unbounded quantitative properties such as mean-payoff bounds.}, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kretinsky, Jan and Petrov, Tatjana}, location = {Eindhoven, The Netherlands}, pages = {112 -- 129}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Faster statistical model checking for unbounded temporal properties}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-49674-9_7}, volume = {9636}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1230, abstract = {Concolic testing is a promising method for generating test suites for large programs. However, it suffers from the path-explosion problem and often fails to find tests that cover difficult-to-reach parts of programs. In contrast, model checkers based on counterexample-guided abstraction refinement explore programs exhaustively, while failing to scale on large programs with precision. In this paper, we present a novel method that iteratively combines concolic testing and model checking to find a test suite for a given coverage criterion. If concolic testing fails to cover some test goals, then the model checker refines its program abstraction to prove more paths infeasible, which reduces the search space for concolic testing. We have implemented our method on top of the concolictesting tool Crest and the model checker CpaChecker. We evaluated our tool on a collection of programs and a category of SvComp benchmarks. In our experiments, we observed an improvement in branch coverage compared to Crest from 48% to 63% in the best case, and from 66% to 71% on average.}, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw and Gupta, Ashutosh and Henzinger, Thomas A}, location = {St. Petersburg, FL, USA}, pages = {328 -- 347}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Abstraction-driven concolic testing}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-49122-5_16}, volume = {9583}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1391, abstract = {We present an extension to the quantifier-free theory of integer arrays which allows us to express counting. The properties expressible in Array Folds Logic (AFL) include statements such as "the first array cell contains the array length," and "the array contains equally many minimal and maximal elements." These properties cannot be expressed in quantified fragments of the theory of arrays, nor in the theory of concatenation. Using reduction to counter machines, we show that the satisfiability problem of AFL is PSPACE-complete, and with a natural restriction the complexity decreases to NP. We also show that adding either universal quantifiers or concatenation leads to undecidability. AFL contains terms that fold a function over an array. We demonstrate that folding, a well-known concept from functional languages, allows us to concisely summarize loops that count over arrays, which occurs frequently in real-life programs. We provide a tool that can discharge proof obligations in AFL, and we demonstrate on practical examples that our decision procedure can solve a broad range of problems in symbolic testing and program verification.}, author = {Daca, Przemyslaw and Henzinger, Thomas A and Kupriyanov, Andrey}, location = {Toronto, Canada}, pages = {230 -- 248}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Array folds logic}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-41540-6_13}, volume = {9780}, year = {2016}, } @inproceedings{1205, abstract = {In this paper, we present a formal model-driven engineering approach to establishing a safety-assured implementation of Multifunction vehicle bus controller (MVBC) based on the generic reference models and requirements described in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard IEC-61375. First, the generic models described in IEC-61375 are translated into a network of timed automata, and some safety requirements tested in IEC-61375 are formalized as timed computation tree logic (TCTL) formulas. With the help of Uppaal, we check and debug whether the timed automata satisfy the formulas or not. Within this step, several logic inconsistencies in the original standard are detected and corrected. Then, we apply the tool Times to generate C code from the verified model, which was later synthesized into a real MVBC chip. Finally, the runtime verification tool RMOR is applied to verify some safety requirements at the implementation level. We set up a real platform with worldwide mostly used MVBC D113, and verify the correctness and the scalability of the synthesized MVBC chip more comprehensively. The errors in the standard has been confirmed and the resulted MVBC has been deployed in real train communication network.}, author = {Jiang, Yu and Liu, Han and Song, Houbing and Kong, Hui and Gu, Ming and Sun, Jiaguang and Sha, Lui}, location = {Limassol, Cyprus}, pages = {757 -- 763}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Safety assured formal model driven design of the multifunction vehicle bus controller}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-48989-6_47}, volume = {9995}, year = {2016}, } @article{10794, abstract = {Mathematical models are of fundamental importance in the understanding of complex population dynamics. For instance, they can be used to predict the population evolution starting from different initial conditions or to test how a system responds to external perturbations. For this analysis to be meaningful in real applications, however, it is of paramount importance to choose an appropriate model structure and to infer the model parameters from measured data. While many parameter inference methods are available for models based on deterministic ordinary differential equations, the same does not hold for more detailed individual-based models. Here we consider, in particular, stochastic models in which the time evolution of the species abundances is described by a continuous-time Markov chain. These models are governed by a master equation that is typically difficult to solve. Consequently, traditional inference methods that rely on iterative evaluation of parameter likelihoods are computationally intractable. The aim of this paper is to present recent advances in parameter inference for continuous-time Markov chain models, based on a moment closure approximation of the parameter likelihood, and to investigate how these results can help in understanding, and ultimately controlling, complex systems in ecology. Specifically, we illustrate through an agricultural pest case study how parameters of a stochastic individual-based model can be identified from measured data and how the resulting model can be used to solve an optimal control problem in a stochastic setting. In particular, we show how the matter of determining the optimal combination of two different pest control methods can be formulated as a chance constrained optimization problem where the control action is modeled as a state reset, leading to a hybrid system formulation.}, author = {Parise, Francesca and Lygeros, John and Ruess, Jakob}, issn = {2296-665X}, journal = {Frontiers in Environmental Science}, keywords = {General Environmental Science}, publisher = {Frontiers}, title = {{Bayesian inference for stochastic individual-based models of ecological systems: a pest control simulation study}}, doi = {10.3389/fenvs.2015.00042}, volume = {3}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1498, abstract = {Fault-tolerant distributed algorithms play an important role in many critical/high-availability applications. These algorithms are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, due to asynchronous communication and the occurrence of faults, such as the network dropping messages or computers crashing. Nonetheless there is surprisingly little language and verification support to build distributed systems based on fault-tolerant algorithms. In this paper, we present some of the challenges that a designer has to overcome to implement a fault-tolerant distributed system. Then we review different models that have been proposed to reason about distributed algorithms and sketch how such a model can form the basis for a domain-specific programming language. Adopting a high-level programming model can simplify the programmer's life and make the code amenable to automated verification, while still compiling to efficiently executable code. We conclude by summarizing the current status of an ongoing language design and implementation project that is based on this idea.}, author = {Dragoi, Cezara and Henzinger, Thomas A and Zufferey, Damien}, isbn = {978-3-939897-80-4 }, location = {Asilomar, CA, United States}, pages = {90 -- 102}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{The need for language support for fault-tolerant distributed systems}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2015.90}, volume = {32}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1499, abstract = {We consider weighted automata with both positive and negative integer weights on edges and study the problem of synchronization using adaptive strategies that may only observe whether the current weight-level is negative or nonnegative. We show that the synchronization problem is decidable in polynomial time for deterministic weighted automata.}, author = {Kretinsky, Jan and Larsen, Kim and Laursen, Simon and Srba, Jiří}, location = {Madrid, Spain}, pages = {142 -- 154}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik}, title = {{Polynomial time decidability of weighted synchronization under partial observability}}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2015.142}, volume = {42}, year = {2015}, } @article{1539, abstract = {Many stochastic models of biochemical reaction networks contain some chemical species for which the number of molecules that are present in the system can only be finite (for instance due to conservation laws), but also other species that can be present in arbitrarily large amounts. The prime example of such networks are models of gene expression, which typically contain a small and finite number of possible states for the promoter but an infinite number of possible states for the amount of mRNA and protein. One of the main approaches to analyze such models is through the use of equations for the time evolution of moments of the chemical species. Recently, a new approach based on conditional moments of the species with infinite state space given all the different possible states of the finite species has been proposed. It was argued that this approach allows one to capture more details about the full underlying probability distribution with a smaller number of equations. Here, I show that the result that less moments provide more information can only stem from an unnecessarily complicated description of the system in the classical formulation. The foundation of this argument will be the derivation of moment equations that describe the complete probability distribution over the finite state space but only low-order moments over the infinite state space. I will show that the number of equations that is needed is always less than what was previously claimed and always less than the number of conditional moment equations up to the same order. To support these arguments, a symbolic algorithm is provided that can be used to derive minimal systems of unconditional moment equations for models with partially finite state space. }, author = {Ruess, Jakob}, journal = {Journal of Chemical Physics}, number = {24}, publisher = {American Institute of Physics}, title = {{Minimal moment equations for stochastic models of biochemical reaction networks with partially finite state space}}, doi = {10.1063/1.4937937}, volume = {143}, year = {2015}, } @article{1538, abstract = {Systems biology rests on the idea that biological complexity can be better unraveled through the interplay of modeling and experimentation. However, the success of this approach depends critically on the informativeness of the chosen experiments, which is usually unknown a priori. Here, we propose a systematic scheme based on iterations of optimal experiment design, flow cytometry experiments, and Bayesian parameter inference to guide the discovery process in the case of stochastic biochemical reaction networks. To illustrate the benefit of our methodology, we apply it to the characterization of an engineered light-inducible gene expression circuit in yeast and compare the performance of the resulting model with models identified from nonoptimal experiments. In particular, we compare the parameter posterior distributions and the precision to which the outcome of future experiments can be predicted. Moreover, we illustrate how the identified stochastic model can be used to determine light induction patterns that make either the average amount of protein or the variability in a population of cells follow a desired profile. Our results show that optimal experiment design allows one to derive models that are accurate enough to precisely predict and regulate the protein expression in heterogeneous cell populations over extended periods of time.}, author = {Ruess, Jakob and Parise, Francesca and Milias Argeitis, Andreas and Khammash, Mustafa and Lygeros, John}, journal = {PNAS}, number = {26}, pages = {8148 -- 8153}, publisher = {National Academy of Sciences}, title = {{Iterative experiment design guides the characterization of a light-inducible gene expression circuit}}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.1423947112}, volume = {112}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1541, abstract = {We present XSpeed a parallel state-space exploration algorithm for continuous systems with linear dynamics and nondeterministic inputs. The motivation of having parallel algorithms is to exploit the computational power of multi-core processors to speed-up performance. The parallelization is achieved on two fronts. First, we propose a parallel implementation of the support function algorithm by sampling functions in parallel. Second, we propose a parallel state-space exploration by slicing the time horizon and computing the reachable states in the time slices in parallel. The second method can be however applied only to a class of linear systems with invertible dynamics and fixed input. A GP-GPU implementation is also presented following a lazy evaluation strategy on support functions. The parallel algorithms are implemented in the tool XSpeed. We evaluated the performance on two benchmarks including an 28 dimension Helicopter model. Comparison with the sequential counterpart shows a maximum speed-up of almost 7× on a 6 core, 12 thread Intel Xeon CPU E5-2420 processor. Our GP-GPU implementation shows a maximum speed-up of 12× over the sequential implementation and 53× over SpaceEx (LGG scenario), the state of the art tool for reachability analysis of linear hybrid systems. Experiments illustrate that our parallel algorithm with time slicing not only speeds-up performance but also improves precision.}, author = {Ray, Rajarshi and Gurung, Amit and Das, Binayak and Bartocci, Ezio and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Grosu, Radu}, location = {Haifa, Israel}, pages = {3 -- 18}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{XSpeed: Accelerating reachability analysis on multi-core processors}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_1}, volume = {9434}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1594, abstract = {Quantitative extensions of temporal logics have recently attracted significant attention. In this work, we study frequency LTL (fLTL), an extension of LTL which allows to speak about frequencies of events along an execution. Such an extension is particularly useful for probabilistic systems that often cannot fulfil strict qualitative guarantees on the behaviour. It has been recently shown that controller synthesis for Markov decision processes and fLTL is decidable when all the bounds on frequencies are 1. As a step towards a complete quantitative solution, we show that the problem is decidable for the fragment fLTL\GU, where U does not occur in the scope of G (but still F can). Our solution is based on a novel translation of such quantitative formulae into equivalent deterministic automata.}, author = {Forejt, Vojtěch and Krčál, Jan and Kretinsky, Jan}, location = {Suva, Fiji}, pages = {162 -- 177}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Controller synthesis for MDPs and frequency LTL\GU}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-48899-7_12}, volume = {9450}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1601, abstract = {We propose a flexible exchange format for ω-automata, as typically used in formal verification, and implement support for it in a range of established tools. Our aim is to simplify the interaction of tools, helping the research community to build upon other people’s work. A key feature of the format is the use of very generic acceptance conditions, specified by Boolean combinations of acceptance primitives, rather than being limited to common cases such as Büchi, Streett, or Rabin. Such flexibility in the choice of acceptance conditions can be exploited in applications, for example in probabilistic model checking, and furthermore encourages the development of acceptance-agnostic tools for automata manipulations. The format allows acceptance conditions that are either state-based or transition-based, and also supports alternating automata.}, author = {Babiak, Tomáš and Blahoudek, František and Duret Lutz, Alexandre and Klein, Joachim and Kretinsky, Jan and Mueller, Daniel and Parker, David and Strejček, Jan}, location = {San Francisco, CA, United States}, pages = {479 -- 486}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{The Hanoi omega-automata format}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-21690-4_31}, volume = {9206}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1605, abstract = {Multiaffine hybrid automata (MHA) represent a powerful formalism to model complex dynamical systems. This formalism is particularly suited for the representation of biological systems which often exhibit highly non-linear behavior. In this paper, we consider the problem of parameter identification for MHA. We present an abstraction of MHA based on linear hybrid automata, which can be analyzed by the SpaceEx model checker. This abstraction enables a precise handling of time-dependent properties. We demonstrate the potential of our approach on a model of a genetic regulatory network and a myocyte model.}, author = {Bogomolov, Sergiy and Schilling, Christian and Bartocci, Ezio and Batt, Grégory and Kong, Hui and Grosu, Radu}, location = {Haifa, Israel}, pages = {19 -- 35}, publisher = {Springer}, title = {{Abstraction-based parameter synthesis for multiaffine systems}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-26287-1_2}, volume = {9434}, year = {2015}, } @inproceedings{1606, abstract = {In this paper, we present the first steps toward a runtime verification framework for monitoring hybrid and cyber-physical systems (CPS) development tools based on randomized differential testing. The development tools include hybrid systems reachability analysis tools, model-based development environments like Simulink/Stateflow (SLSF), etc. First, hybrid automaton models are randomly generated. Next, these hybrid automaton models are translated to a number of different tools (currently, SpaceEx, dReach, Flow*, HyCreate, and the MathWorks’ Simulink/Stateflow) using the HyST source transformation and translation tool. Then, the hybrid automaton models are executed in the different tools and their outputs are parsed. The final step is the differential comparison: the outputs of the different tools are compared. If the results do not agree (in the sense that an analysis or verification result from one tool does not match that of another tool, ignoring timeouts, etc.), a candidate bug is flagged and the model is saved for future analysis by the user. The process then repeats and the monitoring continues until the user terminates the process. We present preliminary results that have been useful in identifying a few bugs in the analysis methods of different development tools, and in an earlier version of HyST.}, author = {Nguyen, Luan and Schilling, Christian and Bogomolov, Sergiy and Johnson, Taylor}, booktitle = {6th International Conference}, isbn = {978-3-319-23819-7}, location = {Vienna, Austria}, pages = {281 -- 286}, publisher = {Springer Nature}, title = {{Runtime verification for hybrid analysis tools}}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-23820-3_19}, volume = {9333}, year = {2015}, }