Resolving race conditions in asynchronous partial order scenarios

Scenario-based requirements specifications are the industry norm for defining communication protocols. However, such scenarios often contain race conditions. A race condition occurs when events are specified to occur in a particular order, but in practice, this order cannot be guaranteed. The paper...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2005-09, Vol.31 (9), p.767-784
Main Author: Mitchell, B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Communication
Communication industry
Communication systems
Creep
distributed programming
formal methods
Index Terms- Requirements analysis
Inspection
Message passing
Norms
Protocols
Race
Requirements specifications
Semantics
Software engineering
Software tools
Specification languages
Studies
Telecommunications industry
Unified Modeling Language
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Summary:Scenario-based requirements specifications are the industry norm for defining communication protocols. However, such scenarios often contain race conditions. A race condition occurs when events are specified to occur in a particular order, but in practice, this order cannot be guaranteed. The paper considers UML/MSC scenarios that can be described with standard partial order theoretic asynchronous behavioral semantics. We define these to be partial order scenarios. The paper proves there is a unique minimal generalization of a partial order scenario that is race free. The paper also proves there is a unique minimal race free refinement of the behavioral semantics of a partial order scenario. Unlike the generalization, the refinement cannot be realized in the form of a partial order scenario, although it can always be embedded in one. The paper, also proves the results can be generalized to a subclass of iterative scenarios.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2005.104