Modelling Coordinated Atomic Actions in Timed CSP
FTRTFT '00 Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Formal Techniques in Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Systems
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The Coordinated Atomic Action (or CA action) concept is a unified scheme for coordinating complex concurrent activities and supporting error recovery between multiple interacting components in a distributed object system. It provides a conceptual framework for dealing with different kinds of concurrency and achieving fault tolerance by integrating and extending two complementary concepts - conversations and transactions. Conversations (enhanced with concurrent exception handling) are used to control cooperative concurrency and to implement coordinated error recovery whilst transactions are used to maintain the consistency of shared resources in the presence of failures and competitive concurrency. This paper first presents a formal description of the CA action concept based on a linear-time temporal logic system and then demonstrates the practical utility of CA actions through an industrial safety-critical application - the Fault-Tolerant Production Cell case study. A description of an experimental prototype implementation of CA actions is used to illustrate how support can be provided to the application layer for developing fault-tolerant programs that use CA actions as a structuring tool.