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Power is Overrated, Go for Friendliness! Expressiveness, Faithfulness, and Usability in Modeling: The Actor Experience

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Principles of Modeling

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10760))

Abstract

Expressive power of a language is generally defined as the breadth of ideas that can be represented and communicated in a language. For formal languages, the expressive power has been evaluated by checking its Turing completeness. In a modeling process, apart from the modeling language, we have two other counterparts: the system being modeled and the modeler. I argue that faithfulness to the system being modeled and usability for the modeler are at least as important as the expressive power of the modeling language, specially because most of the modeling languages used today are highly expressive. I call faithfulness and usability together “friendliness”. I show how we used the actor-based language Rebeca in modeling different applications, where it is friendly, and where it is not. I discuss how the friendliness of Rebeca may help in the analysis of models and allows for system synthesis on the basis of models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In some places I say Rebeca when I mean Timed Rebeca.

  2. 2.

    The acknowledgment is at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-manet-aodvv2-16.

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Acknowledgements

My work is supported in part by DPAC Project (Dependable Platforms for Autonomous Systems and Control) at Mälardalen University, Sweden, and by the project Self-Adaptive Actors: SEADA? (nr 163205-051) of the Icelandic Research Fund.

I would like to thank the Rebeca team, everyone who worked in the team since 2001, and helped us to gain the insight and the experience, and be where we are now. Special thanks go to Ehsan Khamespanah for refactoring the model checking tool of Rebeca and extending and maintaining it for years. For writing this paper I had to bug the leaders of the three projects explained in the three Sects. 3, 4, and 5; many thanks to Ehsan Khamespanah, Fatemeh Ghassemi, and Zeinab Sharifi. I would also like to thank Reinhard Wilhelm for challenging me on the explanation of the main concepts discussed in this paper. The discussion significantly improved the paper. Thanks to Hossein Hojjat for his careful comments throughout the paper, thanks to Paolo Masci for reading the paper and giving me the right pointers for the standard definitions of usability, thanks to Mohammad Reza Mousavi who kept me on my toes when talking about expressiveness, thanks to Tom Henzinger for his reassuring words, thanks to Alessandro Papadopoulos whose comments made me add some final notes to the paper, and thanks to Hans Hansson, Jan Friso Groot, Mohsen Vakilian and Amin Shali for finding the paper thought provoking and enjoyable. Last but not least thanks to Edward for inspiring me and being the drive and support to finally write this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden

    Marjan Sirjani

  2. School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Marjan Sirjani

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Correspondence to Marjan Sirjani .

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  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Marten Lohstroh

  2. National Instruments, Berkeley, California, USA

    Patricia Derler

  3. Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden, Reykjavík University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Marjan Sirjani

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Sirjani, M. (2018). Power is Overrated, Go for Friendliness! Expressiveness, Faithfulness, and Usability in Modeling: The Actor Experience. In: Lohstroh, M., Derler, P., Sirjani, M. (eds) Principles of Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10760. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95246-8_25

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