Deadlock-free configuration programming

The configuration programming approach has been successfully applied to model parallel and distributed systems in terms of their component processes and relationships separated from the functional aspects of the components' behaviour. This approach promotes the construction of modular and flexible systems but the lack of information about the components' behaviour prevents us verifying important properties such as deadlock freedom in the configuration. We propose including certain information about the components' behaviour (especially the communication and synchronisation patterns) in a more refined level of the configuration. The idea is to associate each component with a template which has a well-defined communication and synchronisation structure. With this information, we can define composition rules that guarantee the configuration is deadlock-free by construction without having to inspect the components' states.<
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