Advanced Concurrency Tools

Overview

The rigorous development of a complex concurrent or distributed system is an immense challenge for any organisation. This course teaches principles of structure and refinement that are particularly useful in understanding such systems. An essential feature of this course is the comprehensive tool support that is provided for reasoning about concurrent systems: communications protocols, distributed databases, and control systems.

Requirements

Students will be expected to have a good working knowledge of the CSP notation: Concurrency. Any student who has not taken Concurrency, obtained a grade of at least A-, should ask for advice before registering for this course.

This course will be run as a reading course over a period of about two weeks during the Easter vacation. Students will be expected to do a considerable amount of independent study (mostly from Bill Roscoe's book). We will meet most days to discuss problems.

Aims

Students will gain experience in applying the Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) formalism to realistic problems in specification and design. They will also gain experience in using a practical toolset for refinement testing and analysis.