Deadlock-free Connguration Programming

The connguration 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 exible systems but the lack of information about the components' behaviour prevents us verifying important properties such as deadlock freedom in the connguration. In this paper, we propose including certain information about the components' behaviour (especially the communication and synchronisation patterns) in a more reened level of the connguration. The idea is to associate each component with a template which has a well-deened communication and synchronisa-tion structure. With this information, we can deene composition rules that guarantee the connguration is deadlock-free by construction without having to inspect the components' states. This paper describes our technique and presents several examples.