On the expressiveness and efficiency of guarded lists in Bach

Abstract

Concurrency theory has received considerable attention, but mostly in the scope of synchronous process algebras such as CCS, CSP, and ACP. As another way of handling concurrency, data-based coordination languages aim to provide a clear separation between interaction and computation by synchronizing processes asynchronously by means of information being available or not on a shared space. Although these languages enjoy interesting properties, verifying program correctness remains challenging. In particular, model checking logic formulae is known to raise performance issues due to the state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose a guarded list construct as a solution to address this problem. Beyond increasing performance, it also enriches the expressiveness of data-based coordination languages and allows for program transformations that further increase the speed of computations.