Measuring concurrency in CCS

[摘要] This research report investigates the application of Charron-Bost's measure of currency m to Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). The aim of thisis twofold: first to evaluate the measure m in terms of criteria gathered from theliterature: and second to determine the feasiblllty of measuring concurrency in CCSand hence provide a new tool for understanding concurrency using CCS. The approachtaken is to identify the differences hetween the message-passing formalism inwhich the measure m is defined, and CCS and to modify this formalism to-enablethe mapping of CCS agents to it. A software tool, the Concurrency MeasurementTool, is developed to permit experimentation with chosen CCS agents. These experimentsshow that the measure m, although intuitively appealing, is defined by analgebraic expression that is ill-behaved. A new measure is defined and it is shownthat it matches the evaluation criteria better than m, although it is still not ideal.This work demonstrates that it is feasible to measure concurrency in CCS and thata methodology has been developed for evaluating concurrency measures.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand