Semantics Of Systems Of Concurrent Processes

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1990 Spring School of Theoretical Computer Science, devoted to the semantics of concurrency. The papers are of two kinds: - surveys and tutorials introducing the subject to novices and students and giving updates of the state of the art, - research papers presenting recent achievements in the semantics of concurrency. The contributions explicate the connections, similarities and differences between various approaches to the semantics of concurrency, such as pomsets and metric semantics, event structures, synchronization trees, fixpoints and languages, traces, CCS and Petri nets, and categorical models. They also cover and compare the various notions of observation and bisimulation equivalences, logics for concurrency, and applications to dis- tributed systems.

The author presents a theory of concurrent processes where three different semantic description methods that are usually studied in isolation are brought together. Petri nets describe processes as concurrent and interacting machines; algebraic process terms describe processes as abstract concurrent processes; and logical formulas specify the intended communication behaviour of processes. At the heart of this theory are two sets of transformation rules for the top-down design of concurrent processes. The first set can be used to transform stepwise logical formulas into process terms, whilst process terms can be transformed into Petri nets by the second set. These rules are based on novel techniques for the operational and denotational semantics of concurrent processes. Various results and relationships between nets, terms and formulas starting with formulas and illustrated by examples. The use of transformations is demonstrated in a series of case studies, and the author also identifies directions for research.

Process Algebra is a formal description technique for complex computer systems, especially those involving communicating, concurrently executing components. It is a subject that concurrently touches many topic areas of computer science and discrete math, including system design notations, logic, concurrency theory, specification and verification, operational semantics, algorithms, complexity theory, and, of course, algebra.This Handbook documents the fate of process algebra since its inception in the late 1970's to the present. It is intended to serve as a reference source for researchers, students, and system designers and engineers interested in either the theory of process algebra or in learning what process algebra brings to the table as a formal system description and verification technique. The Handbook is divided into six parts spanning a total of 19 self-contained Chapters. The organization is as follows. Part 1, consisting of four chapters, covers a broad swath of the basic theory of process algebra. Part 2 contains two chapters devoted to the sub-specialization of process algebra known as finite-state processes, while the three chapters of Part 3 look at infinite-state processes, value-passing processes and mobile processes in particular. Part 4, also three chapters in length, explores several extensions to process algebra including real-time, probability and priority. The four chapters of Part 5 examine non-interleaving process algebras, while Part 6's three chapters address process-algebra tools and applications.

Daily life relies more and more on safety critical systems, e.g. in areas such as power plant control, traffic management, flight control, and many more. MOVEP is a school devoted to the broad subject of modeling and verifying software and hardware systems. This volume contains tutorials and annotated bibliographies covering the main subjects addressed at MOVEP 2000. The four tutorials deal with Model Checking, Theorem Proving, Composition and Abstraction Techniques, and Timed Systems. Three research papers give detailed views of High-Level Message Sequence Charts, Industrial Applications of Model Checking, and the use of Formal Methods in Security. Finally, four annotated bibliographies give an overview of Infinite State Space Systems, Testing Transition Systems, Fault-Model-Driven Test Derivation, and Mobile Processes.

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This book deals with the problem of finding suitable languages that can represent specific classes of Petri nets, the most studied and widely accepted model for distributed systems. Hence, the contribution of this book amounts to the alphabetization of some classes of distributed systems. The book also suggests the need for a generalization of Turing computability theory. It is important for graduate students and researchers engaged with the concurrent semantics of distributed communicating systems. The author assumes some prior knowledge of formal languages and theoretical computer science.

CONCUR'91 is the second international conference on concurrency theory, organized in association with the NFI project Transfer. It is a sequel to the CONCUR'90 conference. Its basic aim is to communicate ongoing work in concurrency theory. This proceedings volume contains 30 papers selected for presentation at the conference (from 71 submitted) together with four invited papers and abstracts of the other invited papers. The papers are organized into sections on process algebras, logics and model checking, applications and specification languages, models and net theory, design and real-time, tools and probabilities, and programming languages. The proceedings of CONCUR'90 are available asVolume 458 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

These Transactions publish archival papers in the broad area of Petri nets and other models of concurrency, ranging from theoretical work to tool support and industrial applications. ToPNoC issues are published as LNCS volumes, and hence are widely distributed and indexed. This Journal has its own Editorial Board which selects papers based on a rigorous two stage refereeing process. ToPNoC contains: Revised versions of a selection of the best papers from workshops and tutorials at the annual Petri net conferences; special sections/issues within particular subareas (similar to those published in the Advances in Petri Nets series); other papers invited for publication in ToPNoC; papers submitted directly to ToPNoC by their authors. This is the first volume of ToPNoC. It contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the best papers from the workshops held at the 28th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency, which took place in Siedlce, Poland, June 25-29, 2007. The material has been selected and evaluated by the two Workshop and Tutorial Chairs, Wil van der Aalst and Jonathan Billington, in close cooperation with the chairs of the individual workshops. The 13 papers in this volume cover a wide range of concurrency-related topics, including: teaching concurrency; process languages; process mining; software engineering; state space visualization techniques; timed Petri nets; unfolding techniques and hardware systems. Thus, this volume gives a good overview of the state of the art in concurrency research.