Semantic Analysis of Concurrent Computing in Decentralized IoT and Robotics Applications

Abstract

As IoT and robotics applications continue to become increasingly complex and decentralized, there is an increase in the difficulty of verifying requirements such as guarantees of reliability, efficiency, and correctness of the entire system. Modern IoT and robotics research and applications employ a variety of technologies to accommodate the distribution of real world IoT devices. Many of these technologies support the orchestration of these devices with concurrent computation and workflow-based processing, e.g., Intel Service Orchestration Layer. We developed a new workflow-based programming language VIPLE (Visual IoT/Robotics Programming Language Environment), which supports the orchestration of decentralized IoT and robotics devices through concurrent computation. VIPLE has been used by many universities for teaching robotics programming, event-driven computing, service-oriented computing, and parallel computing concepts. Historically, simple single threaded applications could be verified by employing formal systems such as Hoare logic. It is difficult to verify parallel and distributed computing. In our recent research, we developed a novel system to verify the semantics and other requirements of decentralized applications written in VIPLE. This system is developed using a combination of the techniques offered in Hoare logic and Rely-Guarantee logic, and it is applied using the automatically generated Pi-Calculus representation of VIPLE applications. This paper focuses on the foundations of this system, its ability to handle concurrent computing and decentralized applications, as well as its ability to support automated verification and semantic analysis.