Formal Execution Research Articles

Formal Modeling Execution Semantic of Control and Data Flow for the Composition Web Services

Formal Modeling Execution Semantic of Control and Data Flow for the Composition Web Services

Blind-Spots

Blind-Spots Sean Bernard (bio) Observations Without Daddy: Vivid Evocations of Growing Up in Texas. James P. White. Tabloid Books Inc. PMB 272, 1223 Wilshire Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90403 240 pages; paper, $7.50. Mentor. Tom Grimes. Tin House Books. http://www.tinhousebooks.com. 256 pages; cloth, $24.95; paper, $16.95. In writing reviews, the manner of a work's execution is usually the most responsible thing a reviewer can look at. Reactions to the story itself, no matter how much we kid ourselves, are almost entirely subjective. Anyone who's taken (or taught) a lit class understands this: no one can convince an eighteen-year-old who wants to be updating his Facebook page that an eight hundred page novel about two guys wandering Dublin and thinking about life is an interesting story. Some students might like it; some will think, "This is boring and has nothing to do with me." You can't sell people on content. But by ignoring the story and looking at the structural innovations in Ulysses (1922), we move beyond the "story"; we move into the critical sphere. It's no longer about the student's engagement with the story; it's about the way the story's been told. In contemporary fiction, there are plenty of authors whose formal execution is a discussion at least as worthy as how "engaging" their stories are. John Barth. Lucy Corin. Lydia Davis. David Foster Wallace. The list is much longer. But in nonfiction, specifically memoir, it's still content, content, content. "How 'interesting' is the story?" we ask, rather than, "How has it been formally crafted?" Memoir that foregrounds form is rare—David Shields and Ander Monson are current exceptions—and so reviewers, rather than rolling up their sleeves and considering an author's execution, are stuck summarizing the basic storylines and themes before arriving at a very intricate, very intellectual, "I liked it" or "I didn't." Most contemporary memoirists aren't asking to be critically considered. This isn't a dodge to get out of reviewing two recent works of nonfiction. It's a caveat. And, too, a complaint. James P. White's memoir, Observations Without Daddy: Vivid Evocations of Growing Up in Texas, arrives decontextualized. (White directs the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.) The book reveals little about White—a few blurbs from older books—and the slender volume is printed on plain white paper. The margins aren't justified. Typos aren't uncommon. And the subject matter is small in scope: a childhood in Texas. Just by opening the book, you feel a small sense of hope. A little slender nothing—what if it's great? How fantastic, to discover a small gem in such modest form. The execution is straightforward, as is the prose: White writes a chronological account of his first eighteen years, set in West Texas in the 1930s and 40s. His style is flat and to strong effect: he writes almost entirely in declarative sentences that are often startling in detail or meaning (White begins by announcing he remembers his birth). There are limited reflections, as White doesn't overly explain the meaning of this moment or that. He just evokes it and stands to the side so the reader can enjoy. When a character dies early on, White writes, "She was stricken, crying, 'Oh! Oh! Oh!' as if someone stuck her with a knife." Describing his grandmother in her garden: "Before noon she would stand on the front porch and shoot caterpillars off of her morning glory vines with a bee bee gun." Talking about a local heartthrob: "The girls in the town swooned over her boy. One girl left a sealed fruit jar with a tongue inside on the doorstep for him." Strange details like these are one of the memoir's strongest points: the precise and unique descriptions have an immediacy and impact found in the best prose. They linger. The rarity of reflections also serves the memoir well. The first comes when White observes, "There are moments in our lives when our hearts are so badly broken that life itself intervenes and gives us healing…. There is something so singular about the periods, because...

Interaction-centric modeling of process choreographies

With the rise of electronic integration between organizations, the need for a precise specification of interaction behavior increases. Information systems, replacing interaction previously carried out by humans via phone, faxes and emails, require a precise specification for handling all possible situations. Such interaction behavior is described in process choreographies. While many proposals for choreography languages have already been made, most of them fall into the category of interconnection models, where the observable behavior of the different partners is described and then related via message flow. As this article will show, this modeling approach fails to support fundamental design principles of choreographies and typically leads to modeling errors. This motivates an alternative modeling style, namely interaction modeling, for overcoming these limitations. While the main concepts are independent of a concrete modeling language, iBPMN is introduced as novel interaction modeling language. Formal execution semantics are provided and a comprehensive toolset implementing the approach is presented.

Methodological Principles of Implementation of International Health Regulations (2005) in the Territory of the Russian Federation

Implementation of IHR (2005) in the territory of Russian Federation is beyond the scope of formal admission and technical execution. Fundamentally amended and principally new conceptual essentials of the present international document in relation to previously valid IHR (1969) are to be implemented. In view of above-mentioned, the realization of IHR (2005) is of experimental (research) character to a certain extent. In connection with this, the procedure of functioning of IHR (2005) demands the monitoring and permanent evaluation by the WHO (in the reports of Director-General) with regards to correspondence of the document to the modern epidemiological, social and economic, and geopolitical realities. The IHR (2005) realization in the territory of the Russian Federation demands the development of a certain methodology and special algorithm of activity which include the differentiation of a range of components of conceptual originality of this document, their integration into the content, principles of sanitary protection, improvement of its 3-levels system on the basis of structural and functional strengthening of the network for monitoring of infectious and parasitic diseases agents, training of specialists on IHR (2005) and sanitary protection of the Russian Federation territory.

Beyond soundness: on the verification of semantic business process models

The verification of control-flow soundness is well understood as an important step before deploying business process models. However, the control flow does not capture what the process activities actually do when they are executed. Semantic annotations offer the opportunity to take this into account. Inspired by semantic Web service approaches such as OWL-S and WSMO, we consider process models in which the individual activities are annotated with logical preconditions and effects, specified relative to an ontology that axiomatizes the underlying business domain. Verification then addresses the overall process behavior, arising from the interaction between control-flow and behavior of individual activities. To this end, we combine notions from the workflow community with notions from the AI actions and change literature. We introduce a formal execution semantics for annotated business processes. We point out four verification tasks that arise, concerning precondition/effect conflicts, reachability, and executability. We examine the borderline between classes of processes that can, or cannot, be verified in polynomial time. For precondition/effect conflicts, we show that the borderline is the same as that of the logic underlying the ontology axioms. For reachability and executability, we identify a class of processes that can be verified in polynomial time by a fixpoint algorithm which we design for that purpose. We show that this class of processes is maximal in the sense that, when generalizing it in any of the most relevant directions, the validation tasks become computationally hard.

Model-Based Development: A New Approach to Engineering Medical Software

With an increasing number of medical device features being implemented in code, the amount of software that is present in a modern device as well as its complexity and criticality has grown sharply over the years. Existing quality-control regimes for software, dependent as they are on traditional inspection and ad-hoc testing techniques, has been unable to meet many of these challenges. The numbers tell the story. In 1998, close to 8% of device failures could be traced to software errors. Currently, the number of device recalls due to software problems is believed by some to be about 18%. Model-based development (MBD) is often suggested as a candidate solution, a novel way of doing software development and quality control. So what is model-based development and what it does it mean for professioals working in the medical instrumentation field? Read on.

EM-BrA2CE v0.1: A Vocabulary and Execution Model for Declarative Business Process Modeling

In management theory of the last decades, much importance has been attached to a process-oriented perspective on organizational (re)structuring. Yet to date, organi-zations still experience difficulties in applying this process-oriented perspective to the design and maintenance information systems. The root of the problem lies with a procedural representation of business processes that contains inadequate information for computer systems to provide flexible automated business process support. The counter-part of a procedural representation is a declarative one that explicitly takes into account the business concerns that govern business processes. Recently, a number of process modeling languages have appeared that could be identified as declarative languages. These modeling languages have very distinct knowledge representation backgrounds, often lack a formal execution model and often only model one aspect of the many business concerns that exist in reality. What is needed are meaningful ways to combine several kinds of expressions, called business rule types, independently of the used methods for knowledge representation and reasoning. In this paper, we present the EM-BrA2CE (Enterprise Modeling using Business Rules, Agents, Activities, Concepts and Events) Framework, a unifying vocabulary and execution model for declarative process modeling. The vocabulary is described in terms of the Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) standard and the execution model is presented as a Colored Petri Net (CP-Net). In addition, we show how declarative process models can contribute to the model-driven design of Service-Oriented Architectures.

Verification of class liveness properties with Java modelling language

Static checking is key for the security of software components. As a component model, this paper considers a Java class enriched with annotations from the Java modelling language (JML). It defines a formal execution semantics for repetitive method invocations from this annotated class, called the class in isolation semantics. Afterwards, a pattern of liveness properties is defined, together with its formal semantics, providing a foundation for both static and runtime checking. This pattern is then inscribed in a complete language of temporal properties, called Java temporal pattern language, extending JML. The authors particularly address the verification of liveness properties by automatically translating the temporal properties into JML annotations for this class. This automatic translation is implemented in a tool called JML annotation generator. Correctness of the generated annotations ensures that the temporal property is established for the executions of the class in isolation.

Efficient Simulation of Formal Processor Models

Computer systems under development are routinely modeled by simulators, and formal verification can be integrated into conventional computer system development by reasoning directly about such simulators. Simulators must be extremely fast to be usable in a real development effort. We have crafted a model for a simple processor in the logic of the ACL2 theorem prover that supports both formal analysis and efficient execution, with performance near that of a simulator written in C. We demonstrate our approach using this simple model and indicate how we applied it to our latest microprocessor.

Modeling and Simulation Semantics for Hybrid Dynamic Physical Systems

This paper develops a mathematical framework for hybrid physical system models. Hybrid models of dynamic physical systems are characterized by time scale and parameter abstractions which lead to sequences of discrete changes in the system between modes of continuous behavior evolution. The goal is to develop formal execution semantics for characterizing hybrid behaviors in terms of three distinct modes of system operation.

Property: Powers: State Powers Statutes Protecting Creditors and Requiring Formal Execution

Property: Powers: State Powers Statutes Protecting Creditors and Requiring Formal Execution

Place of Marketing Agreements in Stabilizing Farm Income

EITHER through direct intervention by government or through combination by sellers, agricultural control programs have manipulated volume or method of production, prices paid for productive resources, levels of demand, and distribution of supplies. Analysis is limited here to manipulation by sellers of average price for already produced supplies. One or more determinants of industry average price are controlled by representatives of the whole industry, for its benefit and at its risk, with formal execution and enforcement of group decisions by government. Participating firms retain competitive identity with respect to scale and method of procurement and production and the uncontrolled determinants of total gross receipts. The primary instruments of these programs are marketing agreements and orders, four attributes of which are considered here: (1) definition, (2) price effects, (3) feasibility of wider use, and (4) necessary statutory changes. Federal programs are emphasized. Agreements and orders are defined in terms of effects upon firm and industry profit policy, control techniques, legal and administrative attributes, limitations, and collateral programs. Price effects are appraised largely in terms of impact upon market structure. Desirability of wider use and of statutory changes is weighed in terms of operational feasibility and effectiveness of control. The basic issue of stabil-

The Concept of a “Cooling-Off Period”

There has at various times during the war been a good deal of discussion of the advantages to be gained from interposing a “cooling-off period” between the conclusion of hostilities in the obvious sense and the formal execution of an elaborate peace treaty. During such a possibly prolonged period of armistice (or whatever else it might be called), some of the passions generated during the war, it is hoped, might be mitigated, and an opportunity given for more leisurely, and therefore more intelligent and farsighted, investigation of many of the knotty problems to which during the war busy statesmen can scarcely be expected to apply their minds.The attractiveness of this idea is obvious enough. It would be an inestimable benefit if somehow or other we could ensure that the postwar settlement would be made by people immune from the passions and hatreds which on all sides are likely to generate clouded and distorted thinking after the war. And it is equally obvious that, even with the most careful preparation now, there will, at the conclusion of the war, still be questions of first-rate importance, about which few people whose judgment merited respect would be prepared to offer confident solutions for immediate application. And even if they had confidence in their judgments on these issues, they are unlikely during the war to make as much progress as might be desired in convincing all the parties whose coöperation will be essential for the execution of their plans of the wisdom of their views.