Ad Hoc Systems Management and Specification with Distributed Petri Nets

A new paper is accepted in the Complexity journal, where the authors are: Juan Sebastian Sosa, Paul Leger, Hiroaki Fukuda, Nicolás Cardozo (https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6760920 – To appear). Here is the abstract:

Managing mobile ad hoc systems is a difficult task due to the high volatility of the systems’ topology. Ad hoc systems are commonly defined by means of their constituent entities and the relationships between such entities, however, a formal specification and run-time execution model is missing. The benefit of a formal specification is that it can enable reasoning about local and global system properties, for example, determining whether the system can reach a given state. We propose a Petri net-based specification and execution model to manage ad hoc distributed systems. Our model enables spontaneous communication between previously unknown system components. The model is locally equivalent to standard Petri nets, and hence could be used for the verification of properties for system snapshots static with respect to connections and disconnection, in which it is possible to analyze liveness, reachability, or conflicts. We validate the usability of our distributed ad hoc Petri net model by modeling distributable systems as described by existing distributed Petri nets approaches. Additionally, we demonstrate the applicability and usability of the proposed model in distributed ad hoc networks by implementing the communication behavior of two prototypical ad hoc network applications, disaster and crisis management, and VANETs, successfully validating the appropriate behavior of the system in each case.

Layer Activation Mechanism for Asynchronous Executions in JavaScript

A new paper is accepted in the Context-Oriented Programming workshop, where the authors are: Hiroaki Fukuda, Paul Leger, and Nicolás Cardozo (To appear). Here is the abstract:

In modern software development with JavaScript, an asynchronous execution model is often adopted to prevent freezing execution triggered by the blocking operations. JavaScript is now used in various types of applications for the Web, smartphones, and serverside due to its rich ecosystem. In such applications, programmers implement several concerns that should perform different behavior according to the current identified context. Context-Oriented Programming (COP) posits layers as an abstraction to manage such
concerns. With COP, programmers can implement context-dependent application behavior in a layer, then (de)activate such layers when the context changes, leading to a change in the system behavior. Additionally, COP offers different scoping strategies which define when and how layers should be (de)activated. The dynamic extent of layers is one of such scoping strategies, which encapsulates the duration of a layer within a block, then deactivates the layer when the block execution ends. However, applying an asynchronous execution model breaks the semantics of dynamic extent because the result of an asynchronous execution generally returns when the caller of the asynchronous execution goes through the block. Existing work proposes a variant of the dynamic extent that activates a layer for a block and its logically-connected asynchronous operations by keeping information across them. However, that proposal only supports one of three kinds of asynchronous operations used in JavaScript (MacroTask, EventTask, and MicroTask). This paper extends on the existing work to support a layer
activation mechanism with a scoping strategy that fulfills all three kinds of asynchronous operations in JavaScript. We show the benefit of our proposal through the implementation of a real-world application for smartphones
.