Phasers pose an interesting synchronization mechanism that generalizes many collective synchronization patterns seen in parallel programming languages, including barriers, clocks, and point-topoint synchronization using latches or semaphores. This work characterizes scheduling constraints on phaser operations, by relating the execution state of two tasks that operate on the same phaser. We prop...

Formalizations are used in systems development to support the description of artifacts and to shape and regulate developer behavior. The limits to applying formalizations in these two ways are discussed based on examples from systems development practice. It is argued that formalizations, for example in the form of methods, are valuable in some situations, but inappropriate in others. The alter...

Fault Tree (FT) is a standard failure modeling technique that has been extensively used to predict reliability, availability and safety of many complex engineering systems. In order to facilitate the formal analysis of FT based analyses, a higher-order-logic formalization of FTs has been recently proposed. However, this formalization is quite limited in terms of handling large systems and trans...

The highly influential framework of conceptual spaces provides a geometric way of representing knowledge. Instances are represented by points in a similarity space and concepts are represented by convex regions in this space. After pointing out a problem with the convexity requirement, we propose a formalization of conceptual spaces based on fuzzy star-shaped sets. Our formalization uses a para...

Moessner’s theorem describes a procedure for generating a sequence of n integer sequences that lead unexpectedly to the sequence of nth powers 1, 2, 3, . . . . Several generalizations of Moessner’s theorem exist. Recently, Kozen and Silva gave an algebraic proof of a general theorem that subsumes Moessner’s original theorem and its known generalizations. In this note, we describe the formalizat...