Type Systems for Distributed Programs: Components and Sessions

Abstract

Modern software systems, in particular distributed ones, are everywhere around us and are at the basis of our everyday activities. Hence, guaranteeing their correctness, consistency and safety is of paramount importance. Their complexity makes the verification of such properties a very challenging task. It is natural to expect that these systems are reliable and above all usable. i) In order to be reliable, compositional models of software systems need to account for consistent dynamic reconfiguration, i.e., changing at runtime the communication patterns of a program. ii) In order to be useful, compositional models of software systems need to account for interaction, which can be seen as communication patterns among components which collaborate together to achieve a common task. The aim of the Ph.D. was to develop powerful techniques based on formal methods for the verification of correctness, consistency and safety properties related to dynamic reconfiguration and communication in complex distributed systems. In particular, static analysis techniques based on types and type systems appeared to be an adequate methodology, considering their success in guaranteeing not only basic safety properties, but also more sophisticated ones like, deadlock or livelock freedom in a concurrent setting. The main contributions of this dissertation are twofold. i) On the components side: we design types and a type system for a concurrent object-oriented calculus to statically ensure consistency of dynamic reconfigurations related to modifications of communication patterns in a program during execution time. ii) On the communication side: we study advanced safety properties related to communication in complex distributed systems like deadlock-freedom, livelock-freedom and progress. Most importantly, we exploit an encoding of types and terms of a typical distributed language, session π-calculus, into the standard typed π-calculus, in order to understand the expressive power of concurrent calculi with structured communication primitives and how they stand with respect to the standard typed concurrent calculi, namely (variants) of typed π-calculus. Then, we show how to derive in the session π-calculus basic properties, like type safety or complex ones, like progress, by encoding.