Abstract. This note addresses the history of process algebra as an area of research in concurrency theory, the theory of parallel and distributed systems in computer science. Origins are traced back to the early seventies of the twentieth century, and developments since that time are sketched. The author gives his personal views on these matters. He also considers the present situation, and states some challenges for the future.

We present a study of the interaction properties of objects in concurrent object oriented programming. We identify a set of basic interaction mechanisms: object identity, asynchronous message passing, implicit receive primitive, which are closed to those of the actor model. Then, we define a minimal algebra of actors as a basic formalism for representing the semantics of concurrent object oriented programming. Finally, we define a notion of observation equivalence between the actor terms of the algebra which has been proved to be a congruence with respect to the parallel composition operator.

Experience of practical systems modelling suggests that the key conceptual components of a model of a system are processes, resources, locations, and environment. In recent work, we have given a process-theoretic account of this view in which resources as well as processes are first-class citizens. This process calculus, SCRP, captures the structural aspects of the semantics of the Demos2k modelling tool. Demos2k represents environment stochastically using a wide range of probability distributions and queue-like data structures. Associated with SCRP is a (bunched) modal logic, MBI, which combines the usual additive connectives of Hennessy-Milner logic with their multiplicative counterparts. In this paper, we complete our conceptual framework by adding to SCRP and MBI an account of a notion of location that is simple, yet sufficiently expressive to capture naturally a wide range of forms of location, both spatial and logical. We also provide a description of an extension of the Demos2k tool to incorporate this notion of location. 1

Abstract. Various forms of rely/guarantee conditions have been used to record and reason about interference in ways that provide compositional development methods for concurrent programs. This paper illustrates such a set of rules and proves their soundness. The underlying concurrent language allows fine-grained interleaving and nested concurrency; it is defined by an operational semantics; the proof that the rely/guarantee rules are consistent with that semantics (including termination) is by a structural induction. A key lemma which relates the states which can arise from the extra interference that results from taking a portion of the program out of context makes it possible to do the proofs without having to perform induction over the computation history. This lemma also offers a way to think about expressibility issues around auxiliary variables in rely/guarantee conditions. 1

A general and abstract framework to defining congruence formats for various process equivalences coalgebraic approach to process equivalence, based on a notion of test suite. The resulting technique is illustrated on the example of completed trace equivalence. Rather than providing formal proofs, the paper is guiding the reader through the process of deriving a congruence format in the test suite approach.

We report on our experience in using the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover to mechanize proofs of observation equivalence for systems with infinitely many states, and for parameterized systems. We follow the direct approach: An infinite relation containing the pair of systems to be shown equivalent is defined, and then proved to be a weak bisimulation. The weak bisimilarity proof is split into many cases, corresponding to the derivatives of the pairs in the relation. Isabelle/HOL automatically proves simple cases, and guarantees that no case is forgotten. The strengths and weaknesses of the approach are discussed.

One of the earliest approaches to giving formal semantics for programming languages was “operational semantics”. Enthusiasm for this approach has waxed and waned (not least in my own mind). The main objective of this paper is to tease apart some concepts involved in writing such operational descriptions and

When people perform computations, they routinely monitor their results, and try to adapt and improve their algorithms when a need arises. The idea of self-adaptive software is to implement this common facility of human mind within the framework of the standard logical methods of software engineering. The ubiquitous practice of testing, debugging and improving programs at the design time should be automated, and established as a continuing run time routine. Technically, the task thus requires combining functionalities of automated software development tools and of runtime environments. Such combinations lead not just to challenging engineering problems, but also to novel theoretical questions. Formal methods are needed, and the standard techniques do not suffice. As a first contribution in this direction, we present a basic mathematical framework suitable for describing self-adaptive software at a high level of semantical abstraction. A static view leads to a structure akin...

Summary. P systems are a biologically inspired model introduced by Gheorghe Păun with the aim of representing the structure and the functioning of the cell. P systems are usually equipped with the maximal parallelism semantics; however, since their introduction, some alternative semantics have been proposed and investigated. We propose a semantics that describes the causal dependencies occurring between the reactions of a P system. We investigate the basic properties that are satisfied by such a semantics. The notion of causality turns out to be quite relevant for biological systems, as it permits to point out which events occurring in a biological pathway are necessary for another event to happen. 1

interpretation was defined originally in terms of flow-charts or dynamic discrete systems [3]. From the usual flow-chart operational semantics, a socalled static (or collecting) semantics is derived automatically by attaching to each program point (flow-chart arc) the set of contexts (states) that flow to that point during execution. The collecting semantics summarizes "what really happens at run-time," and the goal of an abstract semantics is to compute properties for the program points that describe the concrete context sets. The abstract semantics does so by executing the flowchart with abstract values that represent context properties. The above formulation is simple and effective, but flow-charts suffer major weaknesses which preclude their use as a general framework for static program analysis: they are too low-level and they do not enjoy the compositionality property. A subsequent advance was the formulation of abstract interpretation in a compositional manner via denotational s...