Logics For Concurrency

This book is for researchers in computer science, mathematical logic, and philosophical logic. It shows the state of the art in current investigations of process calculi with mainly two major paradigms at work: linear logic and modal logic. The combination of approaches and pointers for further integration also suggests a grander vision for the field.

This book presents five tutorial-style lectures on various approaches to the problem of verifying distributed systems: three chapters concentrate on linear-time or branching-time temporal logics; one addresses process equivalence with an emphasis on infinite-state systems; and the final one presents a novel category-theoretic approach to verification. The various formalisms for expressing properties of concurrent systems, based on automata-theoretic techniques or structural properties, are studied in detail. Much attention is paid to the style of writing and complementary coverage of the relevant issues. Thus these lecture notes are ideally suited for advanced courses on logics for concurrent systems. Equally, they are indispensable reading for anyone researching the area of distributed computing.

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.

This book presents five tutorial-style lectures on various approaches to the problem of verifying distributed systems: three chapters concentrate on linear-time or branching-time temporal logics; one addresses process equivalence with an emphasis on infinite-state systems; and the final one presents a novel category-theoretic approach to verification. The various formalisms for expressing properties of concurrent systems, based on automata-theoretic techniques or structural properties, are studied in detail. Much attention is paid to the style of writing and complementary coverage of the relevant issues. Thus these lecture notes are ideally suited for advanced courses on logics for concurrent systems. Equally, they are indispensable reading for anyone researching the area of distributed computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2004, held in London, UK in August/September 2004. The 29 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. Among the topics covered are concurrency related aspects of models of computation, semantic domains, process algebras, Petri nets, event structures, real-time systems, hybrid systems, decidability, model checking, verification techniques, refinement, term and graph rewriting, distributed programming, constraint logic programming, object-oriented programming, typing systems and algorithms, case studies, tools, and environments for programming and verification.

The cooperation test [Apt, Francez & de Roever] was originally conceived to capture the proof theoretical analogue of distributed message exchange between disjoint processes, as opposed to the interference freedom test [Owicki & Gries], being the proof theoretical analogue of concurrent communication by means of interference through jointly shared variables. Some authors ([Levin & Gries, Lamport & Schneider, Schlichting and Schneider]) stress that both forms of communication can be proof theoretically characterized using interference freedom only, since proofs for both ultimately amount to an invariance proof of a big global assertion [Ashcroft], invariance of whose parts amounts to interference freedom. Yet I feel that the characteristic nature of the cooperation test is still preserved in the analysis of these authors, because in their analysis of CSP the part dealing with interference freedom specializes to maintenance of a global invariant, the expression of which requires per process the introduction of auxiliary variables which are updated in that process only, thus preserving the concept of disjointness (as opposed to sharing), since now all variables from different processes are disjoint. The cooperation test has been applied to characterize concurrent communication as occurring in Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) [Hoare 2], Ichbiah's ADA [ARM], and Brinch Hansen's Distributed Processes (DP) [Brinch Hansen]. This characterization has been certified through soundness and completeness proofs [Apt 2, Gerth]. As in the interference freedom test this characterization consists of two stages, a local sequential stage and a global stage.

This Festschrift volume, pubished in honor of Ugo Montanari on the occasion of his 65th birthday, contains 43 papers, written by friends and colleagues, all leading scientists in their own right, who congregated at a celebratory symposium held on June 12, 2008, in Pisa. The volume consists of seven sections, six of which are dedicated to the main research areas to which Ugo Montanari has contributed: Graph Transformation; Constraint and Logic Programming; Software Engineering; Concurrency; Models of Computation; and Software Verification. Each of these six sections starts with an introductory paper giving an account of Ugo Montanari’s contribution to the area and describing the papers in the section. The final section consists of a number of papers giving a laudation of Ugo Montanari’s numerous achievements.