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Communicating finite-state machines (CFMs) are a Turing powerful model of asynchronous message-passing distributed systems. In weakly synchronous systems, processes communicate through phases in which messages are first sent and then received, for each process. Such systems enjoy a limited form of synchronization, and for some communication models, this restriction is enough to make the reachability problem decidable. In particular, we explore the intriguing case of p2p (FIFO) communication, for which the reachability problem is known to be undecidable for four processes, but decidable for two. We show that the configuration reachability problem for weakly synchronous systems of three processes is undecidable. This result is heavily inspired by our study on the treewidth of the Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) that might be generated by such systems. In this sense, the main contribution of this work is a weakly synchronous system with three processes that generates MSCs of arbitrarily large treewidth.

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE'23, the 16th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, which was held at the NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal, as a satellite event of DisCoTec'22. The ICE workshop series features a distinguishing review and selection procedure: PC members are encouraged to interact, anonymously, with authors. The 2023 edition of ICE included double blind reviewing of original research papers, in order to increase fairness and avoid bias in reviewing. Each paper was reviewed by three PC members, and altogether 5 papers were accepted for publication plus 4 oral presentations which are not part of this volume. We were proud to host 2 invited talks, by Carla Ferreira and Adrian Francalanza. The abstracts of these talks are included in this volume, together with the final versions of the research papers, which take into account the discussion at the workshop and during the review process.

We study the complexity relationship between three models of unbounded memory automata: nu-automata ($\nu$-A), Layered Memory Automata (LaMA)and History-Register Automata (HRA). These are all extensions of finite state automata with unbounded memory over infinite alphabets. We prove that the membership problem is NP-complete for all of them, while they fall into different classes for what concerns non-emptiness. The problem of non-emptiness is known to be Ackermann-complete for HRA, we prove that it is PSPACE-complete for $\nu$-A.

There is a wide variety of message-passing communication models, ranging from synchronous ''rendez-vous'' communications to fully asynchronous/out-of-order communications. For large-scale distributed systems, the communication model is determined by the transport layer of the network, and a few classes of orders of message delivery (FIFO, causally ordered) have been identified in the early days of distributed computing. For local-scale message-passing applications, e.g., running on a single machine, the communication model may be determined by the actual implementation of message buffers and by how FIFO queues are used. While large-scale communication models, such as causal ordering, are defined by logical axioms, local-scale models are often defined by an operational semantics. In this work, we connect these two approaches, and we present a unified hierarchy of communication models encompassing both large-scale and local-scale models, based on their concurrent behaviors. We also show that all the communication models we consider can be axiomatized in the monadic second order logic, and may therefore benefit from several bounded verification techniques based on bounded special treewidth.

This volume contains the proceedings of ICE'22, the 15th Interaction and Concurrency Experience, which was held as an hybrid event in Lucca, Italy, and as a satellite event of DisCoTec'22. The ICE workshop series features a distinguishing review and selection procedure: PC members are encouraged to interact, anonymously, with authors. The 2022 edition of ICE included double blind reviewing of original research papers, in order to increase fairness and avoid bias in reviewing. Each paper was reviewed by between two and four PC members (with an average of 3.33333333333), and altogether 5 papers were accepted for publication -- plus 3 oral presentations which are not part of this volume. We were proud to host 2 invited talks, by Ilaria Castellani and Matthew Parkinson. The abstracts of these talks are included in this volume, together with the final versions of the research papers, which take into account the discussion at the workshop.

FIFO automata are finite state machines communicating through FIFO queues. They can be used for instance to model distributed protocols. Due to the unboundedness of the FIFO queues, several verification problems are undecidable for these systems. In order to model-check such systems, one may look for decidable subclasses of FIFO systems. Binary half-duplex systems are systems of two FIFO automata exchanging over a half-duplex channel. They were studied by Cece and Finkel who established the decidability in polynomial time of several properties. These authors also identified some problems in generalising half-duplex systems to multi-party communications. We introduce greedy systems, as a candidate to generalise binary half-duplex systems. We show that greedy systems retain the same good properties as binary half-duplex systems, and that, in the setting of mailbox communications, greedy systems are quite closely related to a multiparty generalisation of half-duplex systems., Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2021, arXiv:2109.14908

A communicating system is $k$-synchronizable if all of the message sequence charts representing the executions can be divided into slices of $k$ sends followed by $k$ receptions. It was previously shown that, for a fixed given $k$, one could decide whether a communicating system is $k$-synchronizable. This result is interesting because the reachability problem can be solved for $k$-synchronizable systems. However, the decision procedure assumes that the bound $k$ is fixed. In this paper we improve this result and show that it is possible to decide if such a bound $k$ exists., Comment: Long version of CIAA paper (19 pages)

In this paper, we work on the notion of k-synchronizability: a system is k-synchronizable if any of its executions, up to reordering causally independent actions, can be divided into a succession of k-bounded interaction phases. We show two results (both for mailbox and peer-to-peer automata): first, the reachability problem is decidable for k-synchronizable systems; second, the membership problem (whether a given system is k-synchronizable) is decidable as well. Our proofs fix several important issues in previous attempts to prove these two results for mailbox automata.

In this paper we present a novel approach to automatically infer parameters of spiking neural networks. Neurons are modelled as timed automata waiting for inputs on a number of different channels (synapses), for a given amount of time (the accumulation period). When this period is over, the current potential value is computed considering current and past inputs. If this potential overcomes a given threshold, the automaton emits a broadcast signal over its output channel , otherwise it restarts another accumulation period. After each emission, the automaton remains inactive for a fixed refractory period. Spiking neural networks are formalised as sets of automata, one for each neuron, running in parallel and sharing channels according to the network structure. Such a model is formally validated against some crucial properties defined via proper temporal logic formulae. The model is then exploited to find an assignment for the synaptical weights of neural networks such that they can reproduce a given behaviour. The core of this approach consists in identifying some correcting actions adjusting synaptical weights and back-propagating them until the expected behaviour is displayed. A concrete case study is discussed.

ANDy , Activity Networks with Delays, is a discrete time framework aimed at the qualitative modelling of time-dependent activities. The modular and concise syntax makes ANDy suitable for an easy and natural modelling of time-dependent biological systems (i.e., regulatory pathways). Activities involve entities playing the role of activators, inhibitors or products of biochemical network operation. Activities may have given duration, i.e., the time required to obtain results. An entity may represent an object (e.g., an agent, a biochemical species or a family of thereof) with a local attribute, a state denoting its level (e.g., concentration, strength). Entities levels may change as a result of an activity or may decay gradually as time passes by. The semantics of ANDy is formally given via high-level Petri nets ensuring this way some modularity. As main results we show that ANDy systems have finite state representations even for potentially infinite processes and it well adapts to the modelling of toxic behaviours. As an illustration, we present a classification of toxicity properties and give some hints on how they can be verified with existing tools on ANDy systems. A small case study on blood glucose regulation is provided to exemplify the ANDy framework and the toxicity properties.

In recent work, we have developed a session types discipline for a calculus that features the usual constructs for session establishment and communication, but also two novel constructs that enable communicating processes to be stopped, duplicated, or discarded at runtime. The aim is to understand whether known techniques for the static analysis of structured communications scale up to the challenging context of context-aware, adaptable distributed systems, in which disciplined interaction and runtime adaptation are intertwined concerns. In this short note, we summarize the main features of our session-typed framework with runtime adaptation, and recall its basic correctness properties. We illustrate our framework by means of examples. In particular, we present a session representation of supervision trees, a mechanism for enforcing fault-tolerant applications in the Erlang language., Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.2218

When working with distant collaborators on the same documents, one often uses a version control system, which is a program tracking the history of files and helping importing modifications brought by others as patches. The implementation of such a system requires to handle lots of situations depending on the operations performed by users on files, and it is thus difficult to ensure that all the corner cases have been correctly addressed. Here, instead of verifying the implementation of such a system, we adopt a complementary approach: we introduce a theoretical model, which is defined abstractly by the universal property that it should satisfy, and work out a concrete description of it. We begin by defining a category of files and patches, where the operation of merging the effect of two coinitial patches is defined by pushout. Since two patches can be incompatible, such a pushout does not necessarily exist in the category, which raises the question of which is the correct category to represent and manipulate files in conflicting state. We provide an answer by investigating the free completion of the category of files under finite colimits, and give an explicit description of this category: its objects are finite sets labeled by lines equipped with a transitive relation and morphisms are partial functions respecting labeling and relations.

We propose the concept of adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic process evolution. Such patterns rely on direct ways of controlling the behavior and location of running processes, and so they are at the heart of the adaptation capabilities present in many modern concurrent systems. Adaptable processes have a location and are sensible to actions of dynamic update at runtime; this allows to express a wide range of evolvability patterns for concurrent processes. We introduce a core calculus of adaptable processes and propose two verification problems for them: bounded and eventual adaptation. While the former ensures that the number of consecutive erroneous states that can be traversed during a computation is bound by some given number k, the latter ensures that if the system enters into a state with errors then a state without errors will be eventually reached. We study the (un)decidability of these two problems in several variants of the calculus, which result from considering dynamic and static topologies of adaptable processes as well as different evolvability patterns. Rather than a specification language, our calculus intends to be a basis for investigating the fundamental properties of evolvable processes and for developing richer languages with evolvability capabilities.

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice declarative language which has been originally designed for writing constraint solvers and which is nowadays a general purpose language. CHR programs consist of multi-headed guarded rules which allow to rewrite constraints into simpler ones until a solved form is reached. Many empirical evidences suggest that multiple heads augment the expressive power of the language, however no formal result in this direction has been proved, so far. In the first part of this paper we analyze the Turing completeness of CHR with respect to the underneath constraint theory. We prove that if the constraint theory is powerful enough then restricting to single head rules does not affect the Turing completeness of the language. On the other hand, differently from the case of the multi-headed language, the single head CHR language is not Turing powerful when the underlying signature (for the constraint theory) does not contain function symbols. In the second part we prove that, no matter which constraint theory is considered, under some reasonable assumptions it is not possible to encode the CHR language (with multi-headed rules) into a single headed language while preserving the semantics of the programs. We also show that, under some stronger assumptions, considering an increasing number of atoms in the head of a rule augments the expressive power of the language. These results provide a formal proof for the claim that multiple heads augment the expressive power of the CHR language., Comment: v.6 Minor changes, new formulation of definitions, changed some details in the proofs