The design of a complex system warrants a compositional methodology, i.e., composing simple components to obtain a larger system that exhibits their collective behavior in a meaningful way. We propose an automaton-based paradigm for compositional design of such systems where an action is accompanied by one or more preferences. At run-time, these preferences provide a natural fallback mechanism for the component, while at design-time they can be used to reason about the behavior of the component in an uncertain physical world. Using structures that tell us how to compose preferences and actions, we can compose formal representations of individual components or agents to obtain a representation of the composed system. We extend Linear Temporal Logic with two unary connectives that reflect the compositional structure of the actions, and show how it can be used to diagnose undesired behavior by tracing the falsification of a specification back to one or more culpable components.
The feasibility of formal methods for the analysis of complex systems crucially depends on a modeling framework that supports compositional design, stepwise refinement and abstractions. An important feature is the clear separation of coordination and computation which permits to apply various verification techniques for the computation performed by components and interactions as well as dependencies between the components. We report here on a model-checking approach using the tool Vereofy that is based on an exogenous coordination model, where the components are represented by their behavioral interfaces. Vereofy supports the verification of the components and their communication structure. Our approach is illustrated by means of a case study with a sensor network where Vereofy has been used to establish several properties of the sensor nodes and their routing procedures. The authors give a very simple uniform explanation of the persistence of exponential decidability. They follow M. Vardi and P. Wolper's theory (1986) that given a formula gamma of a temporal or dynamic logic, it is important to construct an equivalent automation M sub gamma . They characterize the weak monadic theory of the tree; it turns out that weak alternating automata greatly simplify design procedures. > The automata-theoretic approach to linear temporal logic uses the theory of automata as a unifying paradigm for program specification, verification, and synthesis. Both programs and specifications are in essence descriptions of computations. These computations can be viewed as words over some alphabet. Thus, programs and specifications can be viewed as descriptions of languages over some alphabet. The automata-theoretic perspective considers the relationships between programs and their specifications as relationships between languages. By translating programs and specifications to automata, questions about programs and their specifications can be reduced to questions about automata. More specifically, questions such as satisfiability of specifications and correctness of programs with respect to their specifications can be reduced to questions such as nonemptiness and containment of automata.