Ordinary software engineers and programmers can easily understand regular patterns, as shown by the immense interest in and the success of scripting languages like Perl, based essentially on regular expression pattern matching. We believe that regular expressions provide an elegant and powerful specification language also for monitoring requirements, because an execution trace of a program is in fact a string of states. Extended regular expressions (EREs) add complementation to regular expressions, which brings additional benefits by allowing one to specify patterns that must not occur during an execution. Complementation gives one the power to express patterns on strings more compactly. In this paper we present a technique to generate optimal monitors from EREs. Our monitors are deterministic finite automata (DFA) and our novel contribution is to generate them using a modern coalgebraic technique called coinduction. Based on experiments with our implementation, which can be publicly tested and used over the web, we believe that our technique is more efficient than the simplistic method based on complementation of automata which can quickly lead to a highly-exponential state explosion.

We study the succinctness of the complement and intersection of regular expressions. In particular, we show that when constructing a regular expression defining the complement of a given regular expression, a double exponential size increase cannot be avoided. Similarly, when constructing a regular expression defining the intersection of a fixed and an arbitrary number of regular expressions, an exponential and double exponential size increase, respectively, can in worst-case not be avoided. All mentioned lower bounds improve the existing ones by one exponential and are tight in the sense that the target expression can be constructed in the corresponding time class, i.e., exponential or double exponential time. As a by-product, we generalize a theorem by Ehrenfeucht and Zeiger stating that there is a class of DFAs which are exponentially more succinct than regular expressions, to a fixed four-letter alphabet. When the given regular expressions are one-unambiguous, as for instance required by the XML Schema specification, the complement can be computed in polynomial time whereas the bounds concerning intersection continue to hold. For the subclass of single-occurrence regular expressions, we prove a tight exponential lower bound for intersection.

Monitoring-oriented programming (MOP) is a software development and analysis technique in which monitoring plays a fundamental role. MOP users can add their favorite or domain-specific requirements specification formalisms into the framework by means of logic plug-ins, which essentially comprise monitor synthesis algorithms for properties expressed as formulae. The properties are specified together with declarations stating where and how to automatically integrate the corresponding monitor into the system, as well as what to do if the property is violated or validated. In this paper we present Java-MOP, an MOP environment for developing robust Java applications. Based upon a carefully designed specification schema and upon several logic plug-ins, Java-MOP allows users to specify and monitor properties which can refer not only to the current program state, but also to the entire execution trace of a program, including past and future behaviors. 1

A coinduction-based technique to generate an optimal monitor from a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula is presented in this paper. Such a monitor receives a sequence of states (one at a time) from a running process, checks them against a requirements specification expressed as an LTL formula, and determines whether the formula has been violated or validated. It can also say whether the LTL formula is not monitorable any longer, i.e., that the formula can in the future neither be violated nor be validated. A Web interface for the presented algorithm adapted to extended regular expressions is available.

Abstract. By adding the complement operator (¬), extended regular expressions (ERE) can encode regular languages non-elementarily more succinctly than regular expressions. The ERE membership problem asks whether a word w of size n belongs to the language of an ERE R of size m. Unfortunately, the best known membership algorithms are either nonelementary in m or otherwise require space Ω(n 2)andtimeΩ(n 3); since in many practical applications n can be very large (in the order of billions, e.g., in testing where w represents the execution trace of some system), these space and time requirements could be prohibitive. In this paper we present a simple to implement ERE membership algorithm that runs in space O(n·(m+logn)·2 m ·k) andintimeO(n 2 ·(m+logn) 2 ·2 m ·k), where k is the number of complement operators in R. The presented algorithm outperforms the best known algorithms when n is large. Topics. Automata and formal languages, algorithms, data-structures. 1