A software environment for the specification and analysis of problems of coordination and concurrency

Author

Aggarwal, Sudhir ; Barbará, Daniel ; Meth, Kalman Z.

Author_Institution

AT&T Bell Labs., Murray Hill, NJ, USA

Volume

14

Issue

3

fYear

1988

fDate

3/1/1988 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

280

Lastpage

290

Abstract

The SPANNER software environment for the specification and analysis of concurrent process coordination and resource sharing coordination is described. In the SPANNER environment, one can formally produce a specification of a distributed computing problem, and then verify its validity through reachability analysis and simulation. SPANNER is based on a finite-state machine model called the selection/resolution model. The capabilities of SPANNER are illustrated by the analysis of two classical coordination problems: (1) the dining philosophers; and (2) Dijkstra´s concurrent programming problem. In addition, some of the more recently implemented capabilities of the SPANNER system are discussed, such as process types and cluster variables

Keywords

distributed processing; parallel programming; programming environments; SPANNER software environment; cluster variables; concurrency; concurrent programming; coordination; dining philosophers; distributed computing; finite-state machine model; reachability analysis; selection/resolution model; simulation; software environment; specification; Analytical models; Automata; Computational modeling; Computer languages; Concurrent computing; Distributed computing; Kalman filters; Parallel languages; Protocols; Resource management;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/32.4649

Filename

4649