Modelling Distributed Systems

This textbook guides students through algebraic specification and verification of distributed systems, and some of the most prominent formal verification techniques. The author employs μCRL as the vehicle, a language developed to combine process algebra and abstract data types. The book evolved from introductory courses on protocol verification taught to undergraduate and graduate students of computer science, and the text is supported throughout with examples and exercises. Full solutions are provided in an appendix, while exercise sheets, lab exercises, example specifications and lecturer slides are available on the author's website.

This classroom-tested textbook provides an accessible introduction to the design, formal modeling, and analysis of distributed computer systems. The book uses Maude, a rewriting logic-based language and simulation and model checking tool, which offers a simple and intuitive modeling formalism that is suitable for modeling distributed systems in an attractive object-oriented and functional programming style. Topics and features: introduces classical algebraic specification and term rewriting theory, including reasoning about termination, confluence, and equational properties; covers object-oriented modeling of distributed systems using rewriting logic, as well as temporal logic to specify requirements that a system should satisfy; provides a range of examples and case studies from different domains, to help the reader to develop an intuitive understanding of distributed systems and their design challenges; examples include classic distributed systems such as transport protocols, cryptographic protocols, and distributed transactions, leader election, and mutual execution algorithms; contains a wealth of exercises, including larger exercises suitable for course projects, and supplies executable code and supplementary material at an associated website. This self-contained textbook is designed to support undergraduate courses on formal methods and distributed systems, and will prove invaluable to any student seeking a reader-friendly introduction to formal specification, logics and inference systems, and automated model checking techniques.

Many applications follow the distributed computing paradigm, in which parts of the application are executed on different network-interconnected computers. The extension of these applications in terms of number of users or size has led to an unprecedented increase in the scale of the infrastructure that supports them. Large-Scale Distributed Computing and Applications: Models and Trends offers a coherent and realistic image of today's research results in large scale distributed systems, explains state-of-the-art technological solutions for the main issues regarding large scale distributed systems, and presents the benefits of using large scale distributed systems and the development process of scientific and commercial distributed applications.

Nowadays, distributed systems are increasingly present, for public software applications as well as critical systems. software applications as well as critical systems. This title and Distributed Systems: Design and Algorithms – from the same editors – introduce the underlying concepts, the associated design techniques and the related security issues. The objective of this book is to describe the state of the art of the formal methods for the analysis of distributed systems. Numerous issues remain open and are the topics of major research projects. One current research trend consists of profoundly mixing the design, modeling, verification and implementation stages. This prototyping-based approach is centered around the concept of model refinement. This book is more specifically intended for readers that wish to gain an overview of the application of formal methods in the design of distributed systems. Master’s and PhD students, as well as engineers in industry, will find a global understanding of the techniques as well as references to the most up-to-date works in this area.

CD-ROM with a simulation system and numerous solved models is attached to the book. Distributed systems are a continuously expanding area of computer science and computer engineering. This book addresses the need for literature on modeling and simulation techniques for distributed systems. For simulation modeling of distributed systems in the book, a specific class of extended Petri nets is used that allows to easily represent the fundamental processes of any distributed system. The book is intended, first of all, as a text for related graduate-level university courses on distributed systems in computer science and computer engineering. Other computer science and computer engineering courses would also find the book useful as a source of practical information for a broad community of those graduate students who are busy with simulation in their study and research. The book can be useful also to academics who give related graduate courses or deliver research-oriented modules for graduate students. Further, the book can be helpful to system architects and developers who apply modeling and simulation techniques as a step in the design and implementation of their systems. Containing a large number of models, with commented source texts and simulation results on the attached CD-ROM, it can also serve as valuable reference book for researchers who want to develop their own models in terms of Petri nets.

In modern distributed systems, such as the Internet of Things or cloud computing, verifying their correctness is an essential aspect. This requires modeling approaches that reflect the natural characteristics of such systems: the locality of their components, autonomy of their decisions, and their asynchronous communication. However, most of the available verifiers are unrealistic because one or more of these features are not reflected. Accordingly, in this book we present an original formalism: the Integrated Distributed Systems Model (IMDS), which defines a system as two sets (states and messages), and a relation of the "actions" between these sets. The server view and the traveling agent’s view of the system provide communication duality, while general temporal formulas for the IMDS allow automatic verification. The features that the model checks include: partial deadlock and partial termination, communication deadlock and resource deadlock. Automatic verification can support the rapid development of distributed systems. Further, on the basis of the IMDS, the Dedan tool for automatic verification of distributed systems has been developed.