On the Introduction of Guarded Lists in Bach: Expressiveness, Correctness, and Efficiency Issues

Concurrency theory has received considerable attention, but mostly in the scope of synchronous process algebras such as CCS, CSP, and ACP. As another way of handling concurrency, data-based coordination languages aim to provide a clear separation between interaction and computation by synchronizing processes asynchronously by means of information being available or not on a shared space. Although these languages enjoy interesting properties, verifying program correctness remains challenging. Some works, such as Anemone, have introduced facilities, including animations and model checking of temporal logic formulae, to better grasp system modelling. However, model checking is known to raise performance issues due to the state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose a guarded list construct as a solution to address this problem. We establish that the guarded list construct increases performance while strictly enriching the expressiveness of data-based coordination languages. Furthermore, we introduce a notion of refinement to introduce the guarded list construct in a correctness-preserving manner.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2023, arXiv:2308.0892

On the Expressiveness of Relative-Timed Coordination Models

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On Timed Coordination Languages

. Although very simple and elegant, Linda-style coordination models lack the notion of time, and are therefore not able to precisely model real-life coordination applications, featuring time-outs and soft real-time constraints. This paper aims at introducing time in these models. To that end, we consider two notions of time, relative time and absolute time, and, for each notion, two types of features. On the one hand, with respect to relative time, we describe two extensions: (i) a delay mechanism to postpone the execution of communication primitives, and (ii) explicit deadlines on the validity of tuples and on the duration of suspension of communication operations. On the other hand, for absolute time, we introduce: (iii) a wait primitive capable of waiting till an absolute point of time, and (iv) time intervals, both on tuples in the data store and on communication operations. The resulting four coordination models are analyzed and compared both from the semantics viewp..