CONCURRENT AUTOMATA


Audience

This Seminar addresses Master and Bachelor students in Computer Science, or possibly in Mathematics, Bioinformatics, CuK or Computerlinguistics. Space permitting we might run it as a combined Seminar/Proseminar.


The first meeting

The first meeting takes place on Tuesday April 15, at 14:00 (sharp), in room SR 016 in E1 3.

 

More details about the organisation will be discussed there. The default option is that the regular meetings will then also be on Tuesdays, from 14:00 to 16:00.


Registration

If you want to register, you will have to use our dCMS.


Overview of the seminar


This Seminar has two goals: (1) to practice and to refine the skills of "scientific presentation", "scientific argumentation", and "scientific reflection"; (2) to learn more about various theoretically challenging and practically relevant automata models.

 

Automata models play an important role in computer science. On one hand they build the foundation for theoretical aspects such as computability or the Chomsky hieararchy of languages. On the other hand they are foundational in the analysis of software systems, hardware, business processes, internet protocols, and wireless networks. In particular, the automatic verification of properties of a system, called model-checking, is based on automata models.

 

In this seminar, we deal with various automata models which in different senses extend finite automata. Every such extension is motivated by a concrete practical application area. This way, we can reason about timed behaviour of real-time systems; describe behaviour of reactive systems using languages composed not of finite but of infinite words; specify classes of models using a modal automata; or reason about randomness using probabilistic automata. We will see how these modelling feature are crucial for the respective application areas.

 


Topics

True concurrency: event structures, Petri nets
Process algebras: CSP, LOTOS, I/O automata
Talking about time: timed automata, priced timed automata, timed automata games
Talking about may and musts: modal automata
Talking about luck: probabilistic automata, probabilistic games

Instructors

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Holger Hermanns
Dr. Jan Krčál