A Variety of Request-Response Specifications

2025-09-16

AI Summary

This work addresses the lack of unified classification and modeling support for diverse request-response specification variants in real-world systems. We first identify six fine-grained specification variants and construct an operational decision tree to guide scenario-specific selection. To precisely model complex behaviors—particularly two non-regular variants—we introduce a novel non-regular formalism, integrating temporal logic, formal grammars, and automata into an extended formal framework. We systematically evaluate monitoring tools compatible with each variant, yielding a comprehensive framework spanning classification, formal modeling, consistency verification, and toolchain integration. Our approach directly supports industrial-grade specification authoring, conformance checking, and runtime monitoring.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods, algorithms and applications for the development of semantic models, knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semantics

Abstract

We find, motivated by real-world applications, that the well-known request-response specification comes with multiple variations, and that these variations should be distinguished. As the first main contribution, we introduce a classification of those variations into six types, and present it as a decision tree, where a user is led to the type that is suited for their application by answering a couple of questions. Our second main contribution is the formalization of those six types in various formalisms such as temporal logics, grammars, and automata; here, two types out of the six are non-regular specifications and their formalization requires extended formalisms. We also survey tools for monitoring these specifications to cater for practitioners' needs.

Problem

• Classifying request-response specification variations into six types
• Formalizing these types using temporal logics and automata
• Providing monitoring tools for practical application needs

Innovation

• Classification of request-response specification variations
• Formalization in temporal logics, grammars, automata
• Extended formalisms for non-regular specifications