Actions and Events in Concurrent Systems Design

Valentin Cassano
(McMaster University)
Thomas S. E. Maibaum
(McMaster University)

In this work, having in mind the construction of concurrent systems from components, we discuss the difference between actions and events. For this discussion, we propose an(other) architecture description language in which actions and events are made explicit in the description of a component and a system. Our work builds from the ideas set forth by the categorical approach to the construction of software based systems from components advocated by Goguen and Burstall, in the context of institutions, and by Fiadeiro and Maibaum, in the context of temporal logic. In this context, we formalize a notion of a component as an element of an indexed category and we elicit a notion of a morphism between components as morphisms of this category. Moreover, we elaborate on how this formalization captures, in a convenient manner, the underlying structure of a component and the basic interaction mechanisms for putting components together. Further, we advance some ideas on how certain matters related to the openness and the compositionality of a component/system may be described in terms of classes of morphisms, thus potentially supporting a compositional rely/guarantee reasoning.

In Nazareno Aguirre and Leila Ribeiro: Proceedings First Latin American Workshop on Formal Methods (LAFM 2013), Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 26th 2013, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 139, pp. 31–45.
Published: 2nd January 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.139.3 bibtex PDF
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