About

Yehia Abd Alrahman

Associate Professor in Computer Science

  • Research interests: Multi-Agent Systems, Verification, Concurrency Theory, Process Algebra, Reactive Synthesis and Supervisory Control
  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  • Formal Methods Division, Office: EDIT Room 6477
  • Göteborgs Universitet | Research
  • Rännvägen 6B , 412 96 Göteborgs, Sweden

But still, the emphasis ought to be on modeling what happens in real systems, whether they are human-made systems like operating systems, or whether they exist already. There is a subtle change from the Turing-like question of what are the fundamental, smallest sets of primitives that you can find to understand computation. I think some of that applies in concurrency, like naming: what is the smallest set of primitives for naming? So some of that applies. But as we move towards mobility, understanding systems that move about globally, you need to commit yourself to a richer set of semantic primitives. I think we are in a terrific tension between (a) finding a small set of primitives and (b) modeling the real world accurately.

Robin Milner

Cambridge 2003

Research Area

Short Bio

I am an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Dept. Of Computer Science and Engineering, Göteborgs Universitet. I also hold a Senior Lecturer position at the CSE Department. I am the principal investigator of "synTM: Synthesis of Teamwork Multi-Agent Systems", a VR Starting Grant from the Swedish Research Council. I have been a Senior research fellow at the Dept. Of Computer Science and Engineering, Göteborgs Universitet working on my VR grant, a research associate at the University of Leicester, working on the ERC consolidator grant D-SynMA, investigating distributed reactive synthesis for Multiagent Systems. I was a PostDoc Researcher at SysMA research unit in IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy; also a member of the Italian Project FILIERASICURA with Cisco Italia. I obtained my PhD, as well as the "Doctor Europeaus" certificate from IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca working towards a Foundational theory of collective-adaptive systems. During my PhD, I have been a visiting research scholar at the Dept. Of Informatics, LFCS Laboratory in the University of Edinburgh where I investigated Quantitative Analysis of collective-adaptive systems.

Research Interests

My research interests revolve around Concurrency theory, Verification and Formal Methods. Among my interests there is one thread which has preoccupied me for 6 years so far. This thread is the semantic basis of collective-adaptive computations. Thus, my focus is on developing mathematical formalisms to describe systems that interact flexibly through various modes of communication, and to reason about their interactions.

Namely, I target the following areas:
  • Foundational theories of Collaborative Multiagent systems;
  • Theory of Computation, Automata, Logics and Games;
  • Automatic synthesis of distributed programs from logical specifications;
  • Model-Checking of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent systems;
  • Population protocols and Choreographies for power distribution networks of electrical grids.

Curriculum Vitae

My Curriculum Vitae

News

Publications

No one shall expel us from the paradise which Cantor has created for us. (Expressing the importance of Georg Cantor's set theory in the development of mathematics.)

David Hilbert

Über das Unendliche 1926

A full list is available at Google Scholar: Google scholar

Research Projects

Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.

Machiavelli Niccolo

The prince

Research Projects


During my career I have been carrying research activities in the following projects:

synTM: Synthesis of Teamwork Multi-Agent Systems.

ERC icon

I am very pleased to announce that I am awarded a VR Starting Grant from the Swedish Resarch Counicl. VR Starting Grants are very competitive with 14% success rate for Year 2020. The aim of the grant is to give junior researchers the opportunity to establish themselves as independent researchrs in Sweden. The Swedish Resarch Council rewards basic research of the highest scientific quality in national competition. The grant is awareded for the project "SynTM: Synthesis of Teamwork Multi-Agent Systems". The purpose of SYNTM is to develop a foundational framework that will enable the automatic production of correct Teamwork MAS from high-level descriptions of desired behaviour. The findings of SYNTM will comprise a significant development of current theories, that are still unable to handle this class of systems. (see project details).

The project is 4 years long and will led by Dr. Yehia Abd Alrahman at the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden.


Grant agreement ID: 2020-03401

Overall budget: SEK 4,000,000

Duration: 2021-2024

D-SynMA: Distributed Synthesis from Single to Multiple Agents

ERC icon I worked on an ERC Consolidator Project, named D-SynMA: Distributed Synthesis from Single to Multiple Agents. We developed a formalism to model and reason about multi-agent systems. We allow agents to interact and communicate in different modes so that they can pursue joint tasks; agents may dynamically synchronize, exchange data, adapt their behaviour, and reconfigure their communication interfaces. The formalism defines a local behaviour based on shared variables and a global one based on message passing. We extended LTL to be able to reason explicitly about the intentions of the different agents and their interaction protocols. Currently, we are exploiting the interaction mechanisms in our formalism to conduct verification analysis compositionally. We want to find a compositional solution to the distributed synthesis problem. More here

AbC: Attribute-based Communication

SWARM ROBOT icon We proposed a process calculus, named AbC, to study the behavioural theory of interactions in collective-adaptive systems by relying on attribute-based communication. An AbC system consists of a set of parallel components each of which is equipped with a set of attributes. Communication takes place in an implicit multicast fashion, and interaction among components is dynamically established by taking into account connections as determined by predicates over their attributes. The structural operational semantics of AbC is based on Labelled Transition Systems that are also used to define bisimilarity between components. Labelled bisimilarity is in full agreement with a barbed congruence, defined by relying on simple basic observables and context closure. The introduced equivalence is used to study the expressiveness of AbC in terms of encoding aspects of broadcast channel-based interactions and to establish formal relationships between system descriptions at different levels of abstraction.

FILIERASICURA: Ensuring safe operation of power distribution grids

SMARTGRID icon

I worked on a project to ensure safe operation of power distribution grids. The idea is that future power grids will comprise a large number of components, each potentially able to carry out operations autonomously. Clearly, in order to ensure safe operation of the grid, individual operations must be coordinated among the different components. Since operation safety is a global property, modelling component coordination typically involves reasoning about systems at a global level. In this project, we proposed a language for specifying grid operation control protocols from a global point of view. We showed how such global specifications can be used to automatically synthesise local controllers of individual components, and that the distributed implementation yielded by such controllers operationally corresponds to the global specification.

Professional Activites

Science is the only bank that pays the best interest (expressing my appreciation of how my life and mind have been shaped through science)

Says Me

a thought in Birmingham 2018

Journal and PC Membership Reviewing

  • Reviewer STTT: Springer International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer
  • Reviewer JLAMP: Elsevier Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming
  • Reviewer TOMACS: ACM Transactions on Modelling and Computer Simulation Journal: Special Issues for FORECAST 2017 and QEST 2018
  • Reviewer CDC2021: IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC):
  • PC member ECAS2021 6th ECAS Workshop on Engineering Collective Adaptive Systems (ECAS2021):

Conference Reviewing

2014 - 2020

    CDC2021, Concur2020, LPAR 2020, WRLA 2020, SEFM 2019, SEFM 2018, MFCS17, TTCS 2017, TASE 2017, COORDINATION 2016 and 2017, FACS 2014 and 2017, FoCAS@SASO14, and WRLA 2014.

Co-supervision

2017 - 2018

Giulio Garbi, a Ph.D. Student @ IMT School for Advanced Studies, Italy.

Talks

2014 - 2020

  • SynTM: Synthesis of Teamwork Multi-Agent Systems, KTH Division of Decision and Control Systems, Sweden, Stockholm, 2021.
  • Reconfigruable Interaction for MAS Modelling, Highlights 2020, Aachen, Germany, 2020. Poster Here!
  • Reconfigruable Interaction for MAS Modelling, AAMAS 2020, Auckland, New Zealand, 2020. Watch Here!
  • A Computational Framework for Adaptive Systems and its Verification, Bernoulli Institute, Netherlands, 2019.
  • A Distributed Communication Infrastructure for Attribute-based Interaction, FORTE'18, Madrid, Spain, 2018;
  • A Theoretical Framework for Collective-Adaptive Systems, Camerino, Italy, January 2018;
  • A Distributed Coordination Infrastructure for Attribute-based Communication, QUANTICOL, Pisa, Italy, 2017;
  • On the Power of Attribute-based Communication, FORTE'16, Heraklion, Greece, 2016;
  • On the Expressiveness of Attribute-based Communication, PEPA CLUB, Edinburgh, UK, 2016;
  • On Expressiveness and Behavioural Theory of Attribute-based Interaction, QUANTICOL, Lucca, Italy, 2015;
  • A Calculus for Attribute-based Communication, SAC'15, Salamanca, Spain, 2015;
  • A Calculus for Attribute-based Communication, CINA meeting, Turin, Italy, 2015;

Software tools

Chuangtse and Hueitse had strolled onto the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, "See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish." "You are not a fish yourself," said Hueitse. "How can you know the happiness of the fish?" "And you not being I," retorted Chuangtse, "how can you know that I do not know?" (expressing the difference between a "knowledge" (EgroupΦ) and a "common knowledge" (CgroupΦ))

Chuangtse, c.

300 B.C.

Open source code from my work can be found on Github

  • R-CHECK :A model checker to verify reconfigurable distributed systems.
  • AbaCuS: A run-time environment for attribute-based interaction in Java;
  • AbC Simulator: Performance Evaluation of attribute-based communication infrastructures;
  • GoAt: Attribute-based interaction in Google Go;
  • The GoAt plugin: An Eclipse plugin for the AbC calculus.