A Family of Resource-Bound Real-Time Process Algebras

Abstract

The Algebra of Communicating Shared Resources (ACSR) is a timed process algebra which extends classical process algebras with the notion of a resource. It takes the view that the timing behavior of a real-time system depends not only on delays due to process synchronization, but also on the availability of shared resources. Thus, ACSR employs resources as a basic primitive and it represents a real-time system as a collection of concurrent processes which may communicate with each other by means of instantaneous events and compete for the usage of shared resources. Resources are used to model physical devices such as processors, memory modules, communication links, or any other reusable resource of limited capacity. Additionally, they provide a convenient abstraction mechanism for capturing a variety of aspects of system behavior. The resulting framework combines the areas of process algebra and real-time scheduling, and can facilitate the reasoning about systems that are sensitive to deadlines, process interaction and resource availability. In this paper we give an overview of ACSR and three of its extensions PACSR, P2ACSR and MCSR, which take into account probabilistic failures, power consumption and multi-capacity resources. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.