Shared Variables Interaction Diagrams Rajeev Alur Radu Grosu Department of Computer and Information Science Department of Computer Science University of Pennsylvania State University of New York at Stony Brook
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract variables paradigm. Textbooks on concurrent programming (e.g., [14, 17]) contain many pictures describing the interac- Scenario-based specifications offer an intuitive and vi- tions of processes communicating by shared variables, and sual way of describing design requirements of distributed similar scenarios arise in diverse areas such as transaction software systems. For the communication paradigm based processing in concurrent databases (c.f. [18]) and consis- on messages, message sequence charts (MSC) offer a stan- tency in shared-memory multiprocessors [13]. dardized and formal notation amenable to formal analysis. In our definition of an SVID, an action corresponds to, In this paper, we define shared variables interaction dia- possibly multiple, reading/writing of shared variables. The grams (SVID) as the counterpart of MSCs when processes actions of one process are visually ordered. The causal de- communicate via shared variables. After formally defining pendence among actions of different processes is illustrated SVIDs, we develop an intuitive as well as formal definition Ô by arrows: an arrow from an action a of process to an ac- of refinement for SVIDs. This notion provides a basis for Õ Õ tion b of process means that reads a value that was writ- systematically adding details to SVID requirements. ten by Ô. If the variable involved in this communication is write-shared, then there is an implicit additional constraint b that between these two actions a and , there is no interven- 1.