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Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
A common technique to verify complex logic specifications for dynamical systems is the construction of symbolic abstractions: simpler, finite-state models whose behaviour mimics the one of the systems of interest. Typically, abstractions…
The iterative and incremental nature of software development using models typically makes a model of a system incomplete (i.e., partial) until a more advanced and complete stage of development is reached. Existing model execution approaches…
We introduce contracts for linear dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. Contracts are used to express formal specifications on the dynamic behaviour of such systems through two aspects: assumptions and guarantees. The assumptions are a…
Self-improvement is a critical capability for large language models and other intelligent systems, enabling them to refine their behavior and internal consistency without external supervision. Despite its importance, prior approaches…
Scientists often use observational time series data to study complex natural processes, but regression analyses often assume simplistic dynamics. Recent advances in deep learning have yielded startling improvements to the performance of…
This chapter introduces evolutionary antifragility as the time-scale interaction characteristics of a natural dynamic system. It describes the benefit derived from input distribution unevenness, based on the emergent system dynamics and its…
Product configuration systems are often based on a variability model. The development of a variability model is a time consuming and error-prone process. Considering the ongoing development of products, the variability model has to be…
This paper tackles the challenge of detecting unreliable behavior in regression algorithms, which may arise from intrinsic variability (e.g., aleatoric uncertainty) or modeling errors (e.g., model uncertainty). First, we formally introduce…
The emergence of complex behaviors in cellular automata is an area that has been widely developed in recent years with the intention to generate and analyze automata that produce space-moving patterns or gliders that interact in a periodic…
Due to the diffusion of IoT, modern software systems are often thought to control and coordinate smart devices in order to manage assets and resources, and to guarantee efficient behaviours. For this class of systems, which interact…
Hyperproperties are correctness conditions for labelled transition systems that are more expressive than traditional trace properties, with particular relevance to security. Recently, Attiya and Enea studied a notion of strong observational…
From formal and practical analysis, we identify new challenges that self-adaptive systems pose to the process of quality assurance. When tackling these, the effort spent on various tasks in the process of software engineering is naturally…
Explaining the behavior of black box machine learning models through human interpretable rules is an important research area. Recent work has focused on explaining model behavior locally i.e. for specific predictions as well as globally…
Context: Performance regressions negatively impact execution time and memory usage of software systems. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate the effectiveness of performance test suites. Performance mutation…
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show significant potential for achieving high autonomy in various scenarios such as software development. Recent research has shown that LLM agents can leverage past experiences to…
Maintaining an acceptable level of quality of service in modern complex systems is challenging, particularly in the presence of various forms of uncertainty caused by changing execution context, unpredicted events, etc. Although…
Today's software systems are highly distributed and interconnected, and they increasingly rely on communication to achieve their goals; due to their societal importance, security and trustworthiness are crucial aspects for the correctness…
Model-driven design of software for safety-critical applications often relies on mathematically grounded techniques such as the B method. Such techniques consist in the successive applications of refinements to derive a concrete…
ion is one of the most promising approaches to improve the performance of problem solvers. In several domains abstraction by dropping sentences of a domain description -- as used in most hierarchical planners -- has proven useful. In this…