A denotational framework for fair communicating processes
Susan Older, Stephen Brookes · 1996
views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of ONR or the U.S. Government. Keywords: Denotational semantics, fairness, communicating processes, traces, concurrency, The behavior of a parallel system depends not only on the properties of the individual components running in parallel, but also on the interactions among those components. These interactions in turn depend on external factors (such as the relative speed of processors or the particular scheduler implementation) whose details can be complex or even unknown. By introducing appropriate fairness assumptions—which, roughly speaking, states that every sufficiently enabled component eventually proceeds—we can abstract away from these details without ignoring them completely. However, modeling fairness for communicating processes is especially difficult: synchronization requires the cooperation and active participation of multiple processes, and hence the enabledness of a process depends on the ability of other processes to synchronize with it. This dissertation introduces a general framework for modeling fairness for