Task interaction graphs for concurrency analysis

Abstract

The authors present a representation for concurrent systems, called a task interaction graph, that facilitates analysis. They have developed a model of interacting tasks that can considerably reduce the number of states in concurrency graph representations. They call this representation a task interaction concurrency graph (TIGC), since it is derived from a task interaction graph (TIG) instead of from a control-flow representation. Using their model, the authors have compared the resulting representations for some of the common concurrency examples that appear in the literature. For these examples, the number of states were reduced by well over 50%. Such a substantial reduction is expected to have a major impact on the kinds of analysis that can be applied and on the kinds of programs that can be analyzed.<>