Distributed Conflicts in Communicating Systems

We argue that the alternative composition operator of CCS not only lacks expressiveness, but also provides a too abstract description of conflicting activities. Hence, we propose to replace it with a unary conflict operator and a conflict restriction operator, yielding the process algebra DiX. We show that DiX is a semantic extension of CCS. Moreover, DiX is equipped with a simple distributed semantics defined in terms of nets with inhibitor arcs, where the set of transitions is generated by three axiom schemata only. This net semantics is the main motivation for the present proposal. 1. In Proceedings of the pre-ECOOP’94 Workshop on Models and Languages for Coordination of Parallelism and Distribution, Bologna (Italy), July 1994. To appear in LNCS, Springer. Research partially supported by EC BRA n. 9102 COORDINATION. 2. Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Siena, Via del Capitano 15, I-53100 Siena, Italy. 3. Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Bologna, Piazza di Porta S. Donato 5, I-40127 Bologna, Italy