Hernan Melgratti, Emilio Tuosto and Ugo de’Liguoro have studied a notion of refinement in the context of choreographies, a family of formalisms describing interaction protocols among distributed applications. The issue is to make the incremental development of choreographies feasible, through a precise modeling of the conditions that must be satisfied for guaranteeing safety and deadlock freeness properties of compliant processes. To this aim we [the aforementioned researchers] have extended a choreographic formalism to include underspecified actions and developed an interpretation of them into event structures, extending previous work based on pomsets.

The research is related to task T.3.6 and in perspective also T.3.7, if adaptation is interpreted as refinement of protocols to cope with particular contexts. The addressed objectives are O.3.2 and O.3.3. We see refinement as a technique useful to software maintainment and development through several instantiation of a more abstract design; results concerning the notion of sound refinement should be useful to assess software correctness and to ensure its quality on pomsets.

Percentage Completed: this is very hard to quantify, especially if we have to relate the work done in the secondment with the tasks it related to. In the scope of this particular secondment, there is no paper published yet, although one is in the works. Should we put a number, I’d say 40% or 50% but again, it’s almost a random pick.