The papers included in this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science were sel... more The papers included in this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science were selected from a larger set we solicited from leading research groups on both sides of the Atlantic. They cover a wide spectrum of tutorials, recent results and surveys in the area of lightweight and practical formal methods in the design and analysis of safety-critical systems. All the papers we received were submitted to a rigorous process of review and revision, based on which we made our final selection.
Have formal methods in computer science come of age? While the contributions to this special issu... more Have formal methods in computer science come of age? While the contributions to this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science attest to their importance in the design and analysis of particular software systems, their relevance to the field as a whole is far wider. In recent years, formal methods have become more accessible and easier to use, more directly related to practical problems and more adaptable to imperfect and/or approximate specifications in real-life applications. As a result, they are now a central component of computer-science education and research.
The science of network service composition has emerged as one of the grand themes of networking r... more The science of network service composition has emerged as one of the grand themes of networking research [17] as a direct result of the complexity and sophistication of emerging networked systems and applications. By "service composition" we mean that the performance and correctness properties local to the various constituent components of a service can be readily composed into global (end-to-end) properties without re-analyzing any of the constituent components in isolation, or as part of the whole composite service. The set of laws that govern such composition is what will constitute that new science of composition. The heterogeneity and open nature of network systems make composition quite challenging, and thus programming network services has been largely inaccessible to the average user. We identify (and outline) a research agenda in which we aim to develop a specification language that is expressive enough to describe different components of a network service, and th...
Computer science researchers in the programming languages and formal verification communities hav... more Computer science researchers in the programming languages and formal verification communities have produced a variety of automated tools and techniques for assisting formal reasoning tasks. However, while there exist notable successes in utilizing these tools to develop safe and secure software and hardware, both leading-edge advances and basic techniques (such as model checking, state space search, type checking, logical inference and verification, computation of congruence closures, non-interference ...
We present a type system, STAXML, which employs the stacked type syntax to represent essential as... more We present a type system, STAXML, which employs the stacked type syntax to represent essential aspects of the potential roles of XML fragments to the structure of complete XML documents. The simplest application of this system is to enforce well-formedness upon the construction of XML documents without requiring the use of templates or balanced “gap plugging” operators; this allows it to be applied to programs written according to common imperative web scripting idioms, particularly the “echo” ing of ...
When analysing the behavior of complex networked systems, it is often the case that some componen... more When analysing the behavior of complex networked systems, it is often the case that some components within that network are only known to the extent that they belong to one of a set of possible" implementations"–eg, versions of a specific protocol, class of schedulers, etc. In this report we augment the specification language considered in BUCSTR-2004-021, BUCS-TR-2005-014, BUCS-TR-2005-015, and BUCS-TR-2005-033, to include a non-deterministic multiple-choice let-binding, which allows us to consider compositions of networking ...
The papers included in this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science were sel... more The papers included in this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science were selected from a larger set we solicited from leading research groups on both sides of the Atlantic. They cover a wide spectrum of tutorials, recent results and surveys in the area of lightweight and practical formal methods in the design and analysis of safety-critical systems. All the papers we received were submitted to a rigorous process of review and revision, based on which we made our final selection.
Have formal methods in computer science come of age? While the contributions to this special issu... more Have formal methods in computer science come of age? While the contributions to this special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science attest to their importance in the design and analysis of particular software systems, their relevance to the field as a whole is far wider. In recent years, formal methods have become more accessible and easier to use, more directly related to practical problems and more adaptable to imperfect and/or approximate specifications in real-life applications. As a result, they are now a central component of computer-science education and research.
The science of network service composition has emerged as one of the grand themes of networking r... more The science of network service composition has emerged as one of the grand themes of networking research [17] as a direct result of the complexity and sophistication of emerging networked systems and applications. By "service composition" we mean that the performance and correctness properties local to the various constituent components of a service can be readily composed into global (end-to-end) properties without re-analyzing any of the constituent components in isolation, or as part of the whole composite service. The set of laws that govern such composition is what will constitute that new science of composition. The heterogeneity and open nature of network systems make composition quite challenging, and thus programming network services has been largely inaccessible to the average user. We identify (and outline) a research agenda in which we aim to develop a specification language that is expressive enough to describe different components of a network service, and th...
Computer science researchers in the programming languages and formal verification communities hav... more Computer science researchers in the programming languages and formal verification communities have produced a variety of automated tools and techniques for assisting formal reasoning tasks. However, while there exist notable successes in utilizing these tools to develop safe and secure software and hardware, both leading-edge advances and basic techniques (such as model checking, state space search, type checking, logical inference and verification, computation of congruence closures, non-interference ...
We present a type system, STAXML, which employs the stacked type syntax to represent essential as... more We present a type system, STAXML, which employs the stacked type syntax to represent essential aspects of the potential roles of XML fragments to the structure of complete XML documents. The simplest application of this system is to enforce well-formedness upon the construction of XML documents without requiring the use of templates or balanced “gap plugging” operators; this allows it to be applied to programs written according to common imperative web scripting idioms, particularly the “echo” ing of ...
When analysing the behavior of complex networked systems, it is often the case that some componen... more When analysing the behavior of complex networked systems, it is often the case that some components within that network are only known to the extent that they belong to one of a set of possible" implementations"–eg, versions of a specific protocol, class of schedulers, etc. In this report we augment the specification language considered in BUCSTR-2004-021, BUCS-TR-2005-014, BUCS-TR-2005-015, and BUCS-TR-2005-033, to include a non-deterministic multiple-choice let-binding, which allows us to consider compositions of networking ...
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