Resources in process algebra

The Algebra of Communicating Shared Resources (ACSR) is a timed process algebra which extends classical process algebras with the notion of a resource. It takes the view that the timing behavior of a real-time system depends not only on delays due to process synchronization, but also on the availability of shared resources. Thus, ACSR employs resources as a basic primitive and it represents a real-time system as a collection of concurrent processes which may communicate with each other by means of instantaneous events and compete for the usage of shared resources. Resources are used to model physical devices such as processors, memory modules, communication links, or any other reusable resource of limited capacity. Additionally, they provide a convenient abstraction mechanism for capturing a variety of aspects of system behavior. In this paper we give an overview of ACSR and its probabilistic extension, PACSR, where resources can fail with associated failure probabilities. We present associated analysis techniques for performing qualitative analysis (such as schedulability analysis) and quantitative analysis (such as resource utilization analysis) of process-algebraic descriptions. We also discuss mappings between probabilistic and non-probabilistic models, which allow us to use analysis techniques from one algebra on models from the other

Process Algebraic Approach to the Schedulability Analysis and Workload Abstraction of Hierarchical Real-Time Systems

Real-time embedded systems have increased in complexity. As microprocessors become more powerful, the software complexity of real-time embedded systems has increased steadily. The requirements for increased functionality and adaptability make the development of real-time embedded software complex and error-prone. Component-based design has been widely accepted as a compositional approach to facilitate the design of complex systems. It provides a means for decomposing a complex system into simpler subsystems and composing the subsystems in a hierarchical manner. A system composed of real-time subsystems with hierarchy is called a hierarchical real-time system This paper describes a process algebraic approach to schedulability analysis of hierarchical real-time systems. To facilitate modeling and analyzing hierarchical real-time systems, we conservatively extend an existing process algebraic theory based on ACSR-VP (Algebra of Communicating Shared Resources with Value-Passing) for the schedulability of real-time systems. We explain a method to model a resource model in ACSR-VP which may be partitioned for a subsystem. We also introduce schedulability relation to define the schedulability of hierarchical real-time systems and show that satisfaction checking of the relation is reducible to deadlock checking in ACSR-VP and can be done automatically by the tool support of ERSA (Verification, Execution and Rewrite System for ACSR). With the schedulability relation, we present algorithms for abstracting real-time system workloads

A Complete Axiomatization of Finite-state ACSR Processes

A real-time process algebra, called ACSR, has been developed to facilitate the specification and analysis of real-time systems. ACSR supports synchronous timed actions and asynchronous instantaneous events. Timed actions are used to represent the usage of resources and to model the passage of time. Events are used to capture synchronization between processes. To be able to specify real-time systems accurately, ACSR supports a notion of priority that can be used to arbitrate among timed actions competing for the use of resources and among events that are ready for synchronization. In addition to operators common to process algebra, ACSR includes the scope operator which can be used to model timeouts and interrupts. Equivalence between ACSR terms is based on the notion of strong bisimulation. This paper briefly describes the syntax and semantics of ACSR and then presents a set of algebraic laws that can be used to prove equivalence of ACSR processes. The contribution of this paper is the..