Network Modelling Meeting

[Joseph Peters <peters@cs.sfu.ca>]

NETWORK MODELLING GROUP

Friday, October 4, 13:30, ASB 10820

Speaker:  Uwe Glaesser
	  School of Computing Science

Title:    On an Abstract Operational Semantics for Asynchronous Communication
	  Architectures

Abstract: see below

Coffee and cookies will be provided.
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NOTES

1. Uwe has to leave at 2:30 to teach so the meeting will end by 2:30.

2. Several people indicated that they are willing to lead future meetings
   (give a talk, lead a discussion or problem-solving session, ...).
   There are now 45 people on our e-mail list.  If each person leads one
   meeting, we will fill most of a year.  Please send your abstracts or
   descriptions to me, or post them direrctly to net-model@sfu.ca.

3. If you know someone who wants to be on the group e-mail list, or if you
   would like to be removed, please let me know.

Joe.
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ABSTRACT

The abstract state machine - ASM paradigm combines two well established
formalization concepts in a universal framework for mathematical
modelling of discrete dynamic systems at arbitrary levels of
abstraction. Dynamic system behaviour is stated in terms of abstract
machine runs using a state transition system with a simple language for
expressing behaviour primitives. The abstract representation of system
states is based on a variant of structures as used in first-order logic.

For dealing with concurrent and reactive behaviour, the concept of
distributed ASM provides an asynchronous computation model as a
generalization of the basic ASM model. Intuitively, we have some finite
collection of autonomously operating "agents" that interact with each
other by reading and writing shared locations of global machine states.
The underlying semantic model resolves potential conflicts according to
the definition of partially ordered runs.

The talk introduces ASM based modelling of communication architectures
and concurrent languages and outlines some recent industrial
applications.