Rewriting Logic as a Semantic Framework for Concurrency: a Progress Report

This paper surveys the work of many researchers on rewriting logic since it was rst introduced in 1990. The main emphasis is on the use of rewriting logic as a semantic framework for concurrency. The goal in this regard is to express as faithfully as possible a very wide range of concurrency models, each on its own terms, avoiding any encodings or translations. Bringing very diierent models under a common semantic framework makes easier to understand what diierent models have in common and how they diier, to nd deep connections between them, and to reason across their diierent formalisms. It becomes also much easier to achieve in a rigorous way the integration and interoperation of diierent models and languages whose combination ooers attractive advantages. The logic and model theory of rewriting logic are also summarized, a number of current research directions are surveyed, and some concluding remarks about future directions are made.