An efficient distributed online algorithm to detect strong conjunctive predicates

Detecting strong conjunctive predicates is a fundamental problem in debugging and testing distributed programs. A strong conjunctive predicate is a logical statement to represent the desired event of the system. Therefore, if the predicate is not true, an error may occur because the desired event does not happen. Recently, several reported detection algorithms reveal the problem of unbounded state queue growth since the system may generate a huge number of execution states in a very short time. In order to solve this problem, this paper introduces the notion of removable states which can be disregarded in the sense that detection results still remain correct. A fully distributed algorithm is developed in this paper to perform the detection in an online manner. Based on the notion of removable states, the time complexity of the detection algorithm is improved as the number of states to be evaluated is reduced.