Language constructs for timed atomic commitment

Abstract

In a large class of hard-real-time control applications, components execute concurrently on distributed nodes and must coordinate, under timing constraints, to perform the control task. As such, they perform a type of atomic commitment. In traditional atomic commitment there are no timing constraints; agreement is eventual. The authors present a definition of timed atomic commitment (TAC) which requires the processes to be functionally consistent, but allows the outcome to include an exceptional state, indicating that faults have caused timing constraints to be violated. The authors also present a high-level language construct that facilitates the use of TAC in distributed real-time programming and discuss its behavior when faults occur.<>