Types for Deadlock-freedom: The Synchronous Case

by
Rajagopal Nagarajan, Deptartment of Computing, Imperial College, London
Samson Abramsky, Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh
Simon Gay Department of Computer Science, University of London,

Submitted to Theoretical Computer Science, June 16, 1997.

Prepublished version
Published version

ABSTRACT

Many different notions of "program property", and many different methods of verifying such properties, arise naturally in programming. We present a general framework of Specification Structures for combining different notions and methods in a coherent fashion. We then apply the idea of specification structures to concurrency in the setting of Interaction Categories. As a specific example, a certain specification structure defined over the interaction category SProc yields a new category SProcD whose type system is strong enough to guarantee deadlock-freedom of concurrent processes. We present some techniques for manipulating typed processes in this category, and show that they allow us to reason about deadlock-freedom in synchronous networks, a class of concurrent systems which incorporates both synchronous dataflow programs and systolic algorithms.