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

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 common 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 decid-able. It is also shown that the expressive power of A-LTS, linear context-free grammar and deterministic PDA are mutually incomparable. We also discuss the relationship between A-LTS and pointcut/advice in AOP.