A Labeled Transition Model A-LTS for History-Based Aspect Weaving and Its Expressive Power

I. YAGI, Y. TAKATA, H. SEKI
2007 IEICE transactions on information and systems  
Isao YAGI †a) , Nonmember, Yoshiaki TAKATA †b) , and Hiroyuki SEKI †c) , Members SUMMARY This paper proposes an event-based transition system called A-LTS. An A-LTS is a simple system consisting of two agents, a basic program and a monitor. The monitor observes the behavior of the basic program and if the behavior matches some pre-defined pattern, then the monitor interrupts the execution of the basic program and possibly triggers the execution of another specific program. An A-LTS models a
more » ... on feature found in recent software technologies such as Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), history-based access control and active database. We investigate the expressive power of A-LTS and show that it is strictly stronger than finite state machines and strictly weaker than pushdown automata (PDA). This implies that the model checking problem for A-LTS is decidable. It is also shown that the expressive power of A-LTS, linear contextfree grammar and deterministic PDA are mutually incomparable. We also discuss the relationship between A-LTS and pointcut/advice in AOP. key words: labeled transition system, pushdown automaton, formal model, aspect-oriented programming, AspectJ Isao Yagi
doi:10.1093/ietisy/e90-d.5.799 fatcat:mstiiz4z2zfxpmtgg7xjwhrc5u