DCCA: a versatile paradigm for the description and development of concurrent communicating systems

Few methodologies exist that facilitate the formal specification and prototyping of distributed systems. We describe certain features of the Dynamic Coordinated Concurrent Activities (DCCA) model. Any DCCA specification consists of a set of largely independent processes, each of which, however, needs to coordinate with several of its “peers” in the course of its execution. Several diverse real-world applications subscribe to such a paradigm-for example, a distributed control system for an automated factory, and a multiprocessor cache coherence system. DCCA is versatile enough to facilitate the specification of the protocols in both these systems on the same basis. Rapid prototyping and validation is also possible for DCCA models, as we describe in this paper. DCCA, and the attendant toolset could be of great use to a software engineer