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It's All About Coordination pp 107–121Cite as

Release the Beasts: When Formal Methods Meet Real World Data

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10865))

Abstract

It is well-known that the difference between theory and practice seems smaller in theory than in practice. From the perspective of the coordinator, the coordinated components play the role of wild beasts, fortunately imprisoned in boxes. From the perspective of the care-free semanticist, the development of tools is merely a minor step away (possibly hidden in promises of future work). This paper draws parallels between beasts and tool building by describing challenges we have encountered and sharing experiences and lesson learned when going from a compositional semantics to a well-functioning tool interacting with industrial use cases. Concretely, we discuss the development of the simulation backend for Real-Time ABS.

In addition to his scientific contributions, Farhad Arbab has always been an outstanding speaker with a flair for inspiring talks and memorable punchlines. This paper is written for a highly appreciated colleague.

This research was supported by the SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access (237898) and by the EU project HyVar: Scalable Hybrid Variability for Distributed Evolving Software Systems (H2020-644298).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The metaphor of the ‘beast in the box’ was invented by Farhad Arbab around 2005.

  2. 2.

    The reviewers of the EU project Credo (https://projects.cwi.nl/credo/), tasked with implementing Creol [16], correctly pointed out that screenfuls of text (or, for larger model states, hundreds of kilobytes) were not an effective way of communicating and understanding model behavior.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/HyVar/abs_optimizer.

  4. 4.

    https://www.numascale.com/.

  5. 5.

    https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=316829.

  6. 6.

    https://www.haproxy.org.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Rudolf Schlatte, Einar Broch Johnsen, Jacopo Mauro, S. Lizeth Tapia Tarifa & Ingrid Chieh Yu

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  1. Rudolf Schlatte
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Correspondence to Einar Broch Johnsen .

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  1. Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank de Boer

  2. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Marcello Bonsangue

  3. Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jan Rutten

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Schlatte, R., Johnsen, E.B., Mauro, J., Tapia Tarifa, S.L., Yu, I.C. (2018). Release the Beasts: When Formal Methods Meet Real World Data. In: de Boer, F., Bonsangue, M., Rutten, J. (eds) It's All About Coordination. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10865. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90089-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90089-6_8

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