Colloquium Computer Science - Dr. Yehia Abd Alrahman University Gothenburg

Title: A Computational Framework for Adaptive Systems and its Verification

Abstract:
Modern computer systems are inherently distributed and feature
autonomous and collaborative behaviour of multicomponent with global
goals. These goals are expressed in terms of the combined behaviour of
different components that are usually deployed in dynamic and evolving
environments. It is therefore crucial to provide techniques to
generate programs for collaborative and adaptive components, with
guarantees of maintaining their designated global goals. To reach this
endeavour, we need to extend modelling formalisms and specification
languages to account for the specific features of these systems and to
permit specifying both individual and system behaviour. We propose a
computational framework to allow multiple components to interact in
different modes, exchange information, adapt their behaviour, and
reconfigure their communication interfaces. The framework permits a
local interaction based on shared variables and a global one based on
message passing. To be able to reason about local and global
behaviour, we extend LTL to consider the exchanged messages and their
constraints. Finally, we study the computational complexity of
satisfiability and verification considering these extensions.

Short bio:
Yehia Abd Alrahman is a postdoc at the Dept. Of Computer Science and
Engineering, affiliated under both Chalmers and Gothenburg
universities. He has been a research associate at the University of
Leicester and since then he is working on the ERC consolidator grant
D-SynMA (led by Prof. Nir Piterman), investigating distributed
reactive synthesis for multi agent systems.

His main research interests revolve around developing mathematical
formalisms to describe systems that interact flexibly through various
modes of communication. He also has particular interests in game
theory, control theory and automatic synthesis of distributed programs
from logical specifications.