The notion of incremental stability was proposed by several researchers as a
strong property of dynamical and control systems. In this type of stability,
the focus is on the convergence of trajectories with respect to themselves,
rather than with respect to an equilibrium point or a particular trajectory.
Similarly to stability, Lyapunov functions play an important role in the study
of incremental stability.
Asynchronous programming is a ubiquitous systems programming idiom to manage
concurrent interactions with the environment. In this style, instead of waiting
for time-consuming operations to complete, the programmer makes a non-blocking
call to the operation and posts a callback task to a task buffer that is
executed later when the time-consuming operation completes. A co-operative
scheduler mediates the interaction by picking and executing callback tasks from
the task buffer to completion (and these callbacks can post further callbacks
to be executed later).
Simulation and bisimulation metrics for stochastic systems provide a
quantitative generalization of the classical simulation and bisimulation
relations. These metrics capture the similarity of states with respect to
quantitative specifications written in the quantitative {\mu}-calculus and
related probabilistic logics. We first show that the metrics provide a bound
for the difference in long-run average and discounted average behavior across
states, indicating that the metrics can be used both in system verification,
and in performance evaluation.
Refinement Types are a promising approach for checking behavioral properties
of programs written using advanced language features like higher-order
functions, parametric polymorphism and recursive datatypes. The main limitation
of refinement type systems to date is the requirement that the programmer
provides the types of all functions, after which the type system can check the
types and hence, verify the program. In this paper, we show how to
automatically infer refinement types, using existing abstract interpretation
tools for imperative programs.