739 research outputs found
A Study of Concurrency Bugs and Advanced Development Support for Actor-based Programs
The actor model is an attractive foundation for developing concurrent
applications because actors are isolated concurrent entities that communicate
through asynchronous messages and do not share state. Thereby, they avoid
concurrency bugs such as data races, but are not immune to concurrency bugs in
general. This study taxonomizes concurrency bugs in actor-based programs
reported in literature. Furthermore, it analyzes the bugs to identify the
patterns causing them as well as their observable behavior. Based on this
taxonomy, we further analyze the literature and find that current approaches to
static analysis and testing focus on communication deadlocks and message
protocol violations. However, they do not provide solutions to identify
livelocks and behavioral deadlocks. The insights obtained in this study can be
used to improve debugging support for actor-based programs with new debugging
techniques to identify the root cause of complex concurrency bugs.Comment: - Submitted for review - Removed section 6 "Research Roadmap for
Debuggers", its content was summarized in the Future Work section - Added
references for section 1, section 3, section 4.3 and section 5.1 - Updated
citation
Higher-Dimensional Timed Automata
We introduce a new formalism of higher-dimensional timed automata, based on
van Glabbeek's higher-dimensional automata and Alur's timed automata. We prove
that their reachability is PSPACE-complete and can be decided using zone-based
algorithms. We also show how to use tensor products to combat state-space
explosion and how to extend the setting to higher-dimensional hybrid automata
A Logic for True Concurrency
We propose a logic for true concurrency whose formulae predicate about events
in computations and their causal dependencies. The induced logical equivalence
is hereditary history preserving bisimilarity, and fragments of the logic can
be identified which correspond to other true concurrent behavioural
equivalences in the literature: step, pomset and history preserving
bisimilarity. Standard Hennessy-Milner logic, and thus (interleaving)
bisimilarity, is also recovered as a fragment. We also propose an extension of
the logic with fixpoint operators, thus allowing to describe causal and
concurrency properties of infinite computations. We believe that this work
contributes to a rational presentation of the true concurrent spectrum and to a
deeper understanding of the relations between the involved behavioural
equivalences.Comment: 31 pages, a preliminary version appeared in CONCUR 201
Causality in concurrent systems
Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even
biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that
can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a
causal terminology to describe and analyse the relations between the actions in
these systems. However, a thorough discussion about the meaning of causality in
such a context has not been developed yet. This paper aims to fill the gap.
First, the paper analyses the notion of causation in concurrent systems and
attempts to build bridges with the existing philosophical literature,
highlighting similarities and divergences between them. Second, the paper
analyses the use of counterfactual reasoning in ex-post analysis in concurrent
systems (i.e. execution trace analysis).Comment: This is an interdisciplinary paper. It addresses a class of causal
models developed in computer science from an epistemic perspective, namely in
terms of philosophy of causalit
A Logic with Reverse Modalities for History-preserving Bisimulations
We introduce event identifier logic (EIL) which extends Hennessy-Milner logic
by the addition of (1) reverse as well as forward modalities, and (2)
identifiers to keep track of events. We show that this logic corresponds to
hereditary history-preserving (HH) bisimulation equivalence within a particular
true-concurrency model, namely stable configuration structures. We furthermore
show how natural sublogics of EIL correspond to coarser equivalences. In
particular we provide logical characterisations of weak history-preserving (WH)
and history-preserving (H) bisimulation. Logics corresponding to HH and H
bisimulation have been given previously, but not to WH bisimulation (when
autoconcurrency is allowed), as far as we are aware. We also present
characteristic formulas which characterise individual structures with respect
to history-preserving equivalences.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS 2011, arXiv:1108.407
Conflict vs causality in event structures
Event structures are one of the best known models for concurrency. Many variants of the basic model and many possible notions of equivalence for them have been devised in the literature. In this paper, we study how the spectrum of equivalences for Labelled Prime Event Structures built by Van Glabbeek and Goltz changes if we consider two simplified notions of event structures: the first is obtained by removing the causality relation (Coherence Spaces) and the second by removing the conflict relation (Elementary Event Structures). As expected, in both cases the spectrum turns out to be simplified, since some notions of equivalence coincide in the simplified settings; actually, we prove that removing causality simplifies the spectrum considerably more than removing conflict. Furthermore, while the labeling of events and their cardinality play no role when removing causality, both the labeling function and the cardinality of the event set dramatically influence the spectrum of equivalences in the conflict-free setting
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