On the Design of Systems of Cooperating Functional Processes
Authors:
Claus Assmann
and Werner E. Kluge
Department of Computer Science
University of Kiel
24105 Kiel, Germany
E-mail:
ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de,
wk@informatik.uni-kiel.d400.de
Abstract
This paper describes a design concept for systems of
cooperating distributed
processes based on a variant of coloured Petri-nets. It cleanly separates
graphical specification of processes and their interaction
(or communication)
from the algorithmic specifications of the computations that need to be
performed by the individual processes. Designing complex process systems
is aided by abstractions similar to those that are available in
programming languages. In conjunction with a small set of well-defined
interaction schemes for process communication it ensures well-behaving
systems largely by construction. Essential invariance properties of
small subsystems which in incremental steps
may either be verified by formal methods or validated by simulation are
not corrupted when embedding them in the contexts of larger systems.
The paper focuses particularly on the construction of large systems by
recursive abstractions of small net templates which, at execution time,
may be recursively expanded to distribute application
problems evenly over several processing sites for concurrent processing.
Keywords
distributed computing,
cooperating processes,
Petri-nets,
formal verification
[Content]
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[Chair]
[CS Dept]
[Technical Faculty]
[CAU Kiel]
Claus Aßmann
<ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de>