In the field of Sequential Decision Making (SDM), two paradigms have historically vied for supremacy: Automated Planning (AP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). In the spirit of reconciliation, this article reviews AP, RL and hybrid methods (e.g., novel ...

In this article, we focus on the opacity issue of sub-symbolic machine learning predictors by promoting two complementary activities—symbolic knowledge extraction (SKE) and symbolic knowledge injection (SKI)—from and into sub-symbolic predictors. We ...

Identifying requirements for an information system is an important task and conceptual modelling is the first step in this process. Conceptual modelling plays a critical role in the information system design process and usually involves domain experts and ...

Timed automata are a common formalism for the verification of concurrent systems subject to timing constraints. They extend finite-state automata with clocks, that constrain the system behavior in locations, and to take transitions. While timed automata ...

Static analysis tools have showcased their importance and usefulness in automated detection of defects. However, the tools are known to generate a large number of alarms which are warning messages to the user. The large number of alarms and cost incurred ...

Bidirectional typing combines two modes of typing: type checking, which checks that a program satisfies a known type, and type synthesis, which determines a type from the program. Using checking enables bidirectional typing to support features for which ...

This article surveys the linear temporal logic (LTL) literature and presents all the LTL theorems from the survey, plus many new ones, in a calculational deductive system. Calculational deductive systems, developed by Dijkstra and Scholten and extended ...

Register allocation (mapping variables to processor registers or memory) and instruction scheduling (reordering instructions to increase instruction-level parallelism) are essential tasks for generating efficient assembly code in a compiler. In the past ...

Petri nets slicing is a technique that aims to improve the verification of systems modeled in Petri nets. Petri nets slicing was first developed to facilitate debugging, but then was used for the alleviation of the state space explosion problem for the ...

Complex event recognition (CER) applications exhibit various types of uncertainty, ranging from incomplete and erroneous data streams to imperfect complex event patterns. We review CER techniques that handle, to some extent, uncertainty. We examine ...

Human activity recognition in ambient intelligent environments like homes, offices, and classrooms has been the center of a lot of research for many years now. The aim is to recognize the sequence of actions by a specific person using sensor readings. ...

Linearisability is a key correctness criterion for concurrent data structures, ensuring that each history of the concurrent object under consideration is consistent with respect to a history of the corresponding abstract data structure. Linearisability ...

The term “System of Systems” (SoS) has been used since the 1950s to describe systems that are composed of independent constituent systems, which act jointly towards a common goal through the synergism between them. Examples of SoS arise in areas such as ...

Software-product-line engineering has gained considerable momentum in recent years, both in industry and in academia. A software product line is a family of software products that share a common set of features. Software product lines challenge ...

Transformation-based learning (TBL) is a machine learning method for, in particular, sequential classification, invented by Eric Brill [Brill 1993b, 1995a]. It is widely used within computational linguistics and natural language processing, but ...

Timed automata are state-machine-like structures used to model real-time systems. Since their invention in the early 1990s, a number of often subtly differing variants have appeared in the literature; one of this article’s key contributions is defining, ...

Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued progress of information technology. Full verification generally requires, as a crucial step, equipping each loop with a “loop invariant.” Beyond their role in verification, ...

We introduce a unifying framework to provide the semantics of process algebras, including their quantitative variants useful for modeling quantitative aspects of behaviors. The unifying framework is then used to describe some of the most representative ...

A local algorithm is a distributed algorithm that runs in constant time, independently of the size of the network. Being highly scalable and fault tolerant, such algorithms are ideal in the operation of large-scale distributed systems. Furthermore, even ...

Behavioral interface specification languages provide formal code-level annotations, such as preconditions, postconditions, invariants, and assertions that allow programmers to express the intended behavior of program modules. Such specifications are ...