A semantics for distributed Erlang

Abstract

We propose an extension to Fredlund's formal semantics for Erlang that models the concept of nodes. The motivation is that there exist sequences of events that can occur in practice, but are impossible to describe using a single-node semantics, such as Fredlund's. The consequence is that some errors in distributed systems might not be detected by model checkers based on Fredlund's original semantics, or by other single-node verification techniques such as testing. Our extension is modest; it re-uses most of Fredlund's work but adds an extra layer at the top-level.