Fundamenta Informaticae

We propose a model of events with circular causality, in the form of a conservative extension of Winskel's event structures. We study the relations between this new kind of event structures and Propositional Contract Logic. Provable atoms in the logic correspond to reachable events in our event structures. Furthermore, we show a correspondence between the configurations of this new brand of event structures and the proofs in a fragment of Propositional Contract Logic.

We present a fine-grained security model to enforce the access control on the shared constraint store in Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) languages. We show the model for a non-monotonic version of Soft CCP (SCCP), that is an extension of CCP where the constraints have a preference level associated with them. Crisp constraints can be modeled in the same framework as well. In the considered non-monotonic soft version (NmSCCP), it is also possible to remove constraints from the store. The language can be used for coordinating agents on a common store of information that represents the set of shared resources. In such scenarios, it is clearly important to enforce the integrity and confidentiality rights on the resources, in order, for instance, to hide part of the information to some agents, or to prevent an agent to consume too many resources. Finally, we present a bisimulation relation to check equivalence between two programs written in this language.

Compositional graph models for global computing systems must account for two relevant dimensions, namely structural containment and communication linking. In Milner's bigraphs the two dimensions are made explicit and represented as two loosely coupled structures: the place graph and the link graph. Here, bigraphs are compared with an earlier model, gs-graphs, originally conceived for modelling the syntactical structure of agents with α-convertible declarations. We show that gs-graphs are quite convenient also for the new purpose, since the two above mentioned dimensions can be recovered by considering only a specific class of hyper-signatures. With respect to bigraphs, gs-graphs can be proved essentially equivalent, with minor differences at the interface level. We argue that gs-graphs offer a simpler and more standard algebraic structure, based on monoidal categories, for representing both states and transitions. Moreover, they can be equipped with a simple type system to check the well-formedness of legal gs-graphs that are shown to characterise binding bigraphs. Another advantage concerns a textual form in terms of sets of assignments, which can make implementation easier in rewriting frameworks like Maude.

This paper is focused on the connection between the combinatorics of words and minimization of automata. The three main ingredients are the epichristoffel words, Moore automata and a variant of Hopcroft's algorithm for their minimization. Epichristoffel words defined in [14] generalize some properties of circular sturmian words. Here we prove a factorization property and the existence of the reduction tree, that uniquely identifies the structure of the word. Furthermore, in the paper we investigate the problem of the minimization of Moore automata by defining a variant of Hopcroft's minimization algorithm. The use of this variant makes simpler the computation of the running time and consequently the study of families of automata that represent the extremal cases of the minimization process. Indeed, such a variant allows to use the above mentioned factorization property of the epichristoffel words and their reduction trees in order to find an infinite family of Moore automata such that the execution of the algorithm is uniquely determined and tight.

We study a model of one-way quantum automaton where only measurement operations are allowed (MON-1QFA). We give an algebraic characterization of LMO(Σ), showing that the syntactic monoids of the languages in LMO(Σ) are exactly the J-trivial literally idempotent syntactic monoids, where J is the Green's relation determined by two-sided ideals. We also prove that LMO(Σ) coincides with the literal variety of literally idempotent piecewise testable languages. This allows us to prove the existence of a polynomial-time algorithm for deciding whether a regular language belongs to LMO(Σ).

Type and effect systems significantly extend type systems and allow one to express general semantic properties and to statically reason about programs execution. They have been widely exploited to specify static analyses, for example to track computational side effects, resource usage and communication in concurrent languages. In this paper we adopt abstract interpretation techniques to express type and effect systems as abstract semantics. We extend the Cousot's methodology by introducing an abstract domain which (i) is able to express types with annotations, (ii) is reusable in different analyses with few modifications and (iii) is easily implementable. To test our approach we reconstruct two analyses for which the type and effect systems approach were successful.

Joyal's categorical construction on (well-founded) Conway games and winning strategies provides a compact closed category, where tensor and linear implication are defined via Conway disjunctive sum (in combination with negation for linear implication). The equivalence induced on games by the morphisms coincides with the contextual closure of the equideterminacy relation w.r.t. the disjunctive sum. Recently, the above categorical construction has been generalized to non-wellfounded games. Here we investigate Joyal's construction for a different notion of sum, i.e. selective sum. While disjunctive sum reflects the interleaving semantics, selective sum accommodates a form of parallelism, by allowing the current player to move in different parts of the board simultaneously. We show that Joyal's categorical construction can be successfully extended to selective sum, when we consider alternating games, i.e. games where each position is marked as Left player (L) or Right player (R), that is only L or R can move from that position, R starts, and L/R positions strictly alternate. Alternating games typically arise in the context of Game Semantics. This category of well-founded games with selective sum is symmetric monoidal closed, and it induces exactly the equideterminacy relation. Generalizations to non-wellfounded games give linear categories, i.e. models of Linear Logic. Our game models, providing a certain level of parallelism, may be situated halfway between traditional sequential alternating game models and the concurrent game models by Abramsky and Mellies. We work in a context of coalgebraic games, whereby games are viewed as elements of a final coalgebra, and game operations are defined as final morphisms.