Current Trends In Concurrency

The REX School/Symposium "A Decade of Concurrency - Reflections and Perspectives" was the final event of a ten-year period of cooperation between three Dutch research groups working on the foundations of concurrency. Ever since its inception in 1983, the goal of the project has been to contribute to the cross-fertilization between formal methods from the fields of syntax, semantics, and proof theory, aimed at an improved understanding of the nature of parallel computing. The material presented in this volume was prepared by the lecturers (and their coauthors) after the meeting took place. In total, the volume constitutes a thorough state-of-the-art report of the research activities in concurrency.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR '94, held at Uppsala, Sweden in August 1994. In total, 29 refereed research papers selected from 108 submissions for the conference are presented together with full papers or abstracts of the 5 invited talks by prominent speakers. The book contains recent results on all relevant aspects of concurrency research and thus competently documents the progress of the field since the predecessor conference CONCUR '93, the proceedings of which are published as LNCS 715.

The semantics of concurrent systems is one of the most vigorous areas of research in theoretical computer science, but suffers from disagree ment due to different, and often incompatible, attitudes towards abstracting non-sequential behaviour. When confronted with process algebras, which give rise to very elegant, highly abstract and com positional models, traditionally based on the interleaving abstraction, some argue that the wealth of contribution they have made is partially offset by the difficulty in dealing with topics such as faimess. On the other hand, the non-interleaving approaches, based on causality, although easing problems with fairness and confusion, still lack struc ture, compositionality, and the elegance of the interleaving counter parts. Since both these approaches have undoubtedly provided important contributions towards understanding of concurrent systems, one should concentrate on what they have in common, rather than the way they differ. The Intemational Workshop on Semantics for Concurrency held at the University of Leicester on 23-25 July 1990 was organised to help overcome this problem. Its main objective was not to be divisive, but rather to encourage discussions leading towards the identification of the positive objective features of the main approaches, in the hope of furthering common understanding. The Workshop met with an excel lent response, and attracted contributions from all over the world. The result was an interesting and varied programme, which was a combi nation of invited and refereed papers. The invited speakers were: Prof. dr. E. Best (Hildesheim University) Prof. dr. A.

This volume contains the proceedings of CONCURRENCY 88, an international conference on formal methods for distributed systems, held October 18-19, 1988 in Hamburg. CONCURRENCY 88 responded to great interest in the field of formal methods as a means of mastering the complexity of distributed systems. In addition, the impulse was determined by the fact that the various methodological approaches, such as constructive or property oriented methods, have not had an extensive comparative analysis nor have they been investigated with respect to their possible integration and their practical implications. The following topics were addressed: Specification Languages, Models for Distributed Systems, Verification and Validation, Knowledge Based Protocol Modeling, Fault Tolerance, Distributed Databases. The volume contains 12 invited papers and 14 contributions selected by the program committee. They were presented by authors from Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2001, held in Aalborg, Denmark in August 2001. The 32 revised full papers presented together with six invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mobility, probabilistic systems, model checking, process algebra, unfoldings and prefixes, logic and compositionality, and games.

Reactive systems are computing systems which are interactive, such as real-time systems, operating systems, concurrent systems, control systems, etc. They are among the most difficult computing systems to program. Temporal logic is a formal tool/language which yields excellent results in specifying reactive systems. This volume, the first of two, subtitled Specification, has a self-contained introduction to temporal logic and, more important, an introduction to the computational model for reactive programs, developed by Zohar Manna and Amir Pnueli of Stanford University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, respectively.