A Timed Concurrent Constraint Language

2009

Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming (tcc) is a declarative model for concurrency offering a logic for specifying reactive systems, i.e. systems that continuously interact with the environment. The universal tcc formalism (utcc) is an extension of tcc with the ability to express mobility. Here mobility is understood as communication of private names as typically done for mobile systems and security protocols. In this paper we consider the denotational semantics for tcc, and we extend it to a "collecting" semantics for utcc based on closure operators over sequences of constraints. Relying on this semantics, we formalize the first general framework for data flow analyses of tcc and utcc programs by abstract interpretation techniques. The concrete and abstract semantics we propose are compositional, thus allowing us to reduce the complexity of data flow analyses. We show that our method is sound and parametric w.r.t. the abstract domain. Thus, different analyses can be performed by instantiating the framework. We illustrate how it is possible to reuse abstract domains previously defined for logic programming, e.g., to perform a groundness analysis for tcc programs. We show the applicability of this analysis in the context of reactive systems. Furthermore, we make also use of the abstract semantics to exhibit a secrecy flaw in a security protocol. We have developed a prototypical implementation of our methodology and we have implemented the abstract domain for security to perform automatically the secrecy analysis.

Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '95, 1995

We extend the model of [VRV94] to express strong time-outs (and pre-emption): if an event A does not happen through time t, cause event B to happen at time t. Such constructs arise naturally in practice (e.g. in modeling transistors) and are supported in languages such as ESTEREL (through instantaneous watchdogs) and LUSTRE (through the "current" operator). The fundamental conceptual difficulty posed by these operators is that they are non-monotonic. We provide a simple compositional semantics to the non-monotonic version of concurrent constraint programming (CCP) obtained by changing the underlying logic from intuitionistic logic to Reiter's default logic [Rei80]. This allows us to use the same construction (uniform extension through time) to develop Default Timed CCP (Default tcc) as we had used to develop Timed CCP (tcc) from CCP [VRV94]. Indeed the smooth embedding of CCP processes into Default cc processes lifts to a smooth embedding of tcc processes into Default tcc processes. Interesting tcc properties such as determinacy, multi-form time, a uniform pre-emption construct ("clock"), full-abstraction, and compositional compilation into automata are preserved. Default tcc thus provides a simple and natural (denotational) model capable of representing the full range of pre-emption constructs supported in ESTEREL, LUSTRE and other synchronous programming languages.

Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 2014

We propose a timed and soft extension of Concurrent Constraint Programming. The time extension is based on the hypothesis of bounded asynchrony: the computation takes a bounded period of time and is measured by a discrete global clock. Action prefixing is then considered as the syntactic marker which distinguishes a time instant from the next one. Supported by soft constraints instead of crisp ones, tell and ask agents are now equipped with a preference (or consistency) threshold which is used to determine their success or suspension. In the paper we provide a language to describe the agents behavior, together with its operational and denotational semantics, for which we also prove the compositionality and correctness properties. After presenting a semantics using maximal parallelism of actions, we also describe a version for their interleaving on a single processor (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Coordinating agents that need to take decisions both on preference values and time events may benefit from this language.

Journal of Symbolic Computation, 1996

Synchronous programming (Berry (1989)) is a powerful approach to programming reactive systems. Following the idea that \processes are relations extended over time" (Abramsky (1993)), we propose a simple but powerful model for timed, determinate computation, extending the closure-operator model for untimed concurrent constraint programming (CCP). In (Saraswat et al. 1994a) we had proposed a model for this called tcc| here we extend the model of tcc to express strong time-outs: if an event A does not happen through time t, cause event B to happen at time t. Such constructs arise naturally in practice (e.g. in modeling transistors) and are supported in synchronous programming languages. The fundamental conceptual di culty posed by these operations is that they are nonmonotonic. We provide a compositional semantics to the non-monotonic version of concurrent constraint programming (Default cc) obtained by changing the underlying logic from intuitionistic logic to Reiter's default logic. This allows us to use the same construction (uniform extension through time) to develop Timed Default cc as we had used to develop tcc from cc. Indeed the smooth embedding of cc processes into Default cc processes lifts to a smooth embedding of tcc processes into Timed Default cc processes. We identify a basic set of combinators (that constitute the Timed Default cc programming framework), and provide a constructive operational semantics (implemented by us as an interpreter) for which the model is fully abstract. We show that the model is expressive by de ning combinators from the synchronous languages. We show that Timed Default cc is compositional and supports the properties of multiform time, orthogonal preemption and executable speci cations. In addition, Timed Default cc programs can be read as logical formulas (in an intuitionistic temporal logic) | we show that this logic is sound and complete for reasoning about (in)equivalence of Timed Default cc programs. Like the synchronouslanguages, Timed Default cc programscan be compiled into nite state automata. In addition, the translation can be speci ed compositionally. This enables separate compilation of Timed Default cc programs and run-time tradeo s between partial compilation and interpretation. A preliminary version of this paper was published as (Saraswat et al. 1995). Here we present a complete treatment of hiding, along with a detailed treatment of the model.

BRICS Report Series, 2002

The tcc paradigm is a formalism for timed concurrent constraint programming. Several tcc languages differing in their way of expressing infinite behaviour have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we study the expressive power of some of these languages. In particular, we show that:<dl compact="compact"><dt>(1)</dt><dd>recursive procedures with parameters can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with dynamic scoping, and vice-versa.</dd><dt>(2)</dt><dd>replication can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with static scoping, and vice-versa.</dd><dt>(3)</dt><dd>the languages from (1) are strictly more expressive than the languages from (2).</dd></dl>Furthermore, we show that behavioural equivalence is undecidable for the languages from (1), but decidable for the languages from (2). The undecidability result holds even if the process variables take values...

ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2004

A temporal logic is presented for reasoning about the correctness of timed concurrent constraint programs. The logic is based on modalities which allow one to specify what a process produces as a reaction to what its environment inputs. These modalities provide an assumption/commitment style of specification which allows a sound and complete compositional axiomatization of the reactive behavior of timed concurrent constraint programs.

Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGPLAN conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming, 2008

The timed concurrent constraint programing model (tcc) is a declarative framework, closely related to First-Order Linear Temporal Logic (FLTL), for modeling reactive systems. The universal tcc formalism (utcc) is an extension of tcc with the ability to express mobility. Here mobility is understood as communication of private names as typically done for mobile systems and security protocols. This paper is devoted to the study of 1) the expressiveness of utcc and 2) its semantic foundations. As applications of this study, we also state 3) a noteworthy decidability result for the well-established framework of FLTL and 4) bring new semantic insights into the modeling of security protocols. More precisely, we show that in contrast to tcc, utcc is Turing-powerful by encoding Minsky machines. The encoding uses a monadic constraint system allowing us to prove a new result for a fragment of FLTL: The undecidability of the validity problem for monadic FLTL without equality and function symbols. This result refutes a decidability conjecture for FLTL from a previous paper. It also justifies the restriction imposed in previous decidability results on the quantification of flexible-variables. We shall also show that as in tcc, utcc processes can be semantically represented as partial closure operators. The representation is fully abstract wrt the input-output behavior of processes for a meaningful fragment of the utcc. This shows that mobility can be captured as closure operators over an underlying constraint system. As an application we identify a language for security protocols that can be represented as closure operators over a cryptographic constraint system.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2002

The ntcc calculus is a model of non-deterministic temporal concurrent constraint programming. In this paper we study behavioral notions for this calculus. In the underlying computational model, concurrent constraint processes are executed in discrete time intervals. The behavioral notions studied reflect the reactive interactions between concurrent constraint processes and their environment, as well as internal interactions between individual processes. Relationships between the suggested notions are studied, and they are all proved to be decidable for a substantial fragment of the calculus. Furthermore, the expressive power of this fragment is illustrated by examples.

2004

We introduce the Universal Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming (utcc) process calculus; a generalisation of Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming. The utcc calculus allows for the specification of mobile behaviours in the sense of Milner's π-calculus: Generation and communication of private links. We first endow utcc with an operational semantics and then with a symbolic semantics to deal with problematic operational aspects involving infinitely many substitutions and divergent internal computations. The novelty of the symbolic semantics is to use temporal constraints to represent finitely infinitely-many substitutions. We also show that utcc has a strong connection with Pnueli's Temporal Logic. This connection can be used to prove reachability properties of utcc processes. As a compelling example, we use utcc to exhibit the secrecy flaw of the Needham-Schroeder security protocol.