Formal methods for concurrent systems design: a survey

Concurrency is frequently employed as a means to increase the performance of computing systems: a conventional sequential program is designed, to be parallelised later on. This contribution is intended to show that concurrent systems can also differ essentially from conventional, sequential systems, with respect to the kind of problems to be solved, and even to the principal limits of capability and performance. This paper surveys particular concepts and properties of concurrent systems, followed by a choice of models that more or less reflect those properties. Finally, the author discusses a typical example of an algorithm for concurrent systems.<>