Partial orderings of event sets and their application to prototyping concurrent, timed systems

Abstract

RAPIDE is a concurrent, object-oriented language specifically designed for prototyping large concurrent systems. One of the principle design goals has been to adopt a computation model in which the synchronization, concurrency, data flow, and timing aspects of a prototype are explicitly represented and easily accessible both to the prototype itself and to the prototyper. This article describes the partially ordered event set (poset) computation model and the features of RAPIDE for using posets in reactive prototypes and for automatically checking posets. An example prototyping scenario illustrates uses of the poset computation model, with and without timing.