[Disman] Fwd: [Anima] Expressing RFC 9316 Intent Examples in ASSL

[Randy Presuhn <[e-mail]>]

Hi -

I think many on this list would find this work of interest.

Randy


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [Anima] Expressing RFC 9316 Intent Examples in ASSL
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:12:04 -0400
From: William Atwood <[e-mail]>
To: Network Management Research Group <[e-mail]>, Anima WG 
<[e-mail]>
CC: Joey Paquet <[e-mail]>, Solmaz Jaberi 
<[e-mail]>

Dear NMRG and ANIMA people,

One of my students, Solmaz Jaberi, has explored the issue of how to map 
a set of Intent Examples (written in English) into an intermediate form 
that can (eventually) be interpreted by the objects (switches, routers, 
hosts) in an Intent-Based Network.

RFC 9315 provides a definition of Intent, but this is too abstract to 
serve as a basis for demonstrating that a particular intermediate form 
can express all of the characteristics of Intent.  Solmaz has therefore 
formulated a list of "Intent Objectives", based on ideas from RFC 9216, 
RFC 7575, and other documents.

RFC 9316 provides several Intent Classification criteria.  It also 
provides a rich set of Intent Examples.

Solmaz has chosen 11 of these Intent Examples, ensuring that her set of 
examples covers all of the mandatory Intent Objectives, and as many of 
the Intent Classes as possible.

In choosing a target intermediate form, we found only two specification 
languages that permitted the expression of a wide range of Intents: 
NEtwork MOdelling (NEMO), and Autonomic System Specification Language 
(ASSL).  The documentation for NEMO was too sparse to permit an 
evaluation, so we chose to use ASSL, which was designed for the 
specification and verification of autonomous systems.

Solmaz has transformed the English expression of the 11 Intent Examples 
into ASSL.  She has demonstrated that all of the Intent Examples can be 
expressed in ASSL, in a methodical way.  She has shown that ASSL can 
meet almost all of the Intent Objectives.

The virtue of ASSL is that the ASSL development environment provides an 
excellent validation of the semantic correctness of any specified 
autonomic system (or network).

We have found that the principal problem with ASSL is that it cannot 
express dynamism; this makes it impossible to model the addition or 
removal of network components.  A secondary problem is that the present 
implementation of the ASSL compiler produces a single large Java 
program, which make it impossible to distribute the generated code over 
multiple real devices.

The first problem can be resolved through improvements in the design of 
ASSL; the second is simply a matter of altering the compiler so that the 
resulting code is generated as distributed modules.  Clearly, a 
candidate framework for the distributed modules is the Autonomic Service 
Agents defined by the ANIMA RFCs, supplemented by GRASP as the 
communication protocol.

A paper describing this work has been submitted to WIN 2023.  If anyone 
would like a copy of the submission (or of the full thesis), please send 
me an email.

Solmaz was co-supervised by Dr. Joey Paquet.

   Bill Atwood

-- 
Dr. J.W. Atwood, Eng.             tel:   [phone] x3046
Distinguished Professor Emeritus  fax:   [phone]
Department of Computer Science
    and Software Engineering
Concordia University ER 1234      email:[e-mail]
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West    http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~bill
Montreal, Quebec Canada H3G 1M8

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