Graphic modeling in Distributed Autonomous and Asynchronous Automata (DA3)

Abstract

Automated verification of distributed systems becomes very important in distributed computing. The graphical insight into the system in the early and late stages of the project is essential. In the design phase, the visual input helps to articulate the collaborative distributed components clearly. The formal verification gives evidence of correctness or malfunction, but in the latter case, graphical simulation of counterexample helps for better understanding design errors. For these purposes, we invented Distributed Autonomous and Asynchronous Automata (DA3), which have the same semantics as the formal verification base—Integrated Model of Distributed Systems (IMDS). The IMDS model reflects the natural characteristics of distributed systems: unicasting, locality, autonomy, and asynchrony. Distributed automata have all of these features because they share the same semantics as IMDS. In formalism, the unified system definition has two views: the server view of the cooperating distributed nodes and the agent view of the migrating agents performing distributed computations. The automata have two formally equivalent forms that reflect two views: Server DA3 for observing servers exchanging messages, and Agent DA3 for tracking agents, which visit individual servers in their progress of distributed calculations. We present the DA3 formulation based on the IMDS formalism and their application to design and verify distributed systems in the Dedan environment. DA3 formalism is compared with other concepts of distributed automata known from the literature.