Action system approach to the specification and design of distributed systems
Reino Kurki-Suonio, Hannu-Matti Järvinen · 1989
The notion of joint actions provides a paradigm that allows the specification and design of distributed systems to focus on cooperative events rather than on the behavior of individual processes. For concurrency this introduces an abstraction that is independent of process structuring and of communication mechanisms. For the designer this means replacing the conventional process-oriented view by an action-oriented one, which has a profound effect on thinking about a system and on the design process. The approach is especially suited for formal derivation of concurrent systems by a layered introduction of properties. DisCo is an executable specification and design language based on joint actions. This paper introduces the basic principles of the joint action approach, together with the main capabilities of DisCo for supporting modularity and the derivation of distributed programs. 1. Introduction to Specification and Design by Joint Actions The notion of joint actions [7] provides a n...