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A UTP semantic model for Orc language with execution status and fault handling

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Abstract

The Orc language is a concurrency calculus proposed to study the orchestration patterns in service oriented computing. Its special features, such as high concurrency and asynchronism make it a brilliant subject for studying web applications that rely on web services. The conventional semantics for Orc does not contain the execution status of services so that a program cannot determine whether a service has terminated normally or halted with a failure after it published some results. It means that this kind of failure cannot be captured by the fault handler. Furthermore, such a semantic model cannot establish an order saying that a program is better if it fails less often. This paper employs UTP methods to propose a denotational semantic model for Orc that contains execution status information. A failure handling semantics is defined to recover a failure execution back to normal. A refinement order is defined to compare two systems based on their execution failures. Based on this order, a system that introduces a failure recovery mechanism is considered better than one without. An extended operational semantics is also proposed and proven to be equivalent to the denotational semantics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Qin Li, Yongxin Zhao, Huibiao Zhu & Jifeng He

Authors
  1. Qin Li
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  2. Yongxin Zhao
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  3. Huibiao Zhu
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  4. Jifeng He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yongxin Zhao.

Additional information

Qin Li received his PhD from East China Normal University, China in 2011. He is now working as a research staff at The University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests include formal specification and verification, unifying theories of programming, distributed systems and concurrent systems.

Yongxin Zhao is currently an associate professor at Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University. He was a postdoc at School of Computing of National University of Singapore, Singapore from 2012 to 2014. His research interests include program analysis and verification, semantics theory, web services and formal methods and he owns more than 28 referred publications.

Huibiao Zhu is a professor at Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University, also is the Executive Deputy Director of Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing. He received his PhD in Formal Methods from London South Bank University in 2005. During these years he has studied various semantics and their linking theories for Verilog, SystemC, web services and probability system. Currently he is the Chinese PI of the Sino-Danish Basic Research Center IDEA4CPS.

Jifeng He is currently a professor and the Dean of Software Engineering Institute, East China Normal University. He is an academician of Chinese Academy of sciences. He was appointed as the Chief Scientist for several projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and 973 program. And he was also appointed as the leader of the creative research group of NSFC. In recent years, he has also been working on the mathematical model about the co-design of software and hardware, design of real-time embedded systems and cyber physical system.

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Li, Q., Zhao, Y., Zhu, H. et al. A UTP semantic model for Orc language with execution status and fault handling. Front. Comput. Sci. 8, 709–725 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3385-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-014-3385-2

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