CIS 650: Models of Concurrent Systems - Fall 98
Overview
Concurrency is the study of concurrent systems, which comprise
multiple agents that execute simultaneously and interact with one
another. This definition of concurrent systems is deliberately broad:
it includes (among others) parallel computers, networks, and distributed
databases, as well as the protocols that underly each of these physical
systems. Because the behavior of concurrent systems depends so strongly
on the interactions among the computing agents, reasoning formally about
these systems' behaviors requires the use of semantic models that make
explicit this interaction.
This course provides a selective survey of formalisms for specifying and
modeling concurrent systems, with a strong emphasis on process calculi (e.g.,
CSP, CCS, and Milner's pi-calculus) and temporal logic. We will discuss the
standard semantic models for communicating processes, as well as the
accompanying notions of program equivalence, including trace equivalence,
failures equivalence, and bisimulation. We will also discuss a variety of
process calculi, with attention paid to the assumptions about communication
and concurrency that underlie them.
Last modified: Fri 11 Dec 1998
Susan Older / sueo@top.cis.syr.edu