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Towards a complete hierarchy of compositional dataflow models

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Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software (TACS 1991)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 526))

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Abstract

A dataflow network consists of nodes that communicate by passing data over unbounded FIFO channels. For dataflow networks containing only deterministic nodes, Kahn has presented a simple and elegant semantic model. However, the generalization of this model is not compositional for nondeterministic networks. Past work has shown that compositionality can be attained by models based on traces. In the paper, we investigate trace models of dataflow networks, with the aim of characterizing compositional and non-compositional models. We study several compositional trace models, which differ in whether they model liveness, termination or divergence. We relate the models into a hierarchy, according to their capability to distinguish networks. A hierarchy is called complete if any gap between two models in the hierarchy contains no compositional models. Our main contribution is to prove that most of the gaps in our hierarchy do not contain compositional models. Several full abstraction results in the literature follow directly from the gaps in our hierarchy. We also show that by restricting the networks to contain less powerful nondeterministic processes, additional models become compositional. This means that additional models are added to the hierarchy.

Supported in part by the Swedish Board for Technical Development (STU) under contract No. 89-01220P as part of Esprit BRA project SPEC, No. 3096.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Uppsala University, Box 1263, 164 28, Kista, Sweden

    Bengt Jonsson

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Joost N. Kok

Authors
  1. Bengt Jonsson
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  2. Joost N. Kok
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Editor information

Takayasu Ito Albert R. Meyer

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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jonsson, B., Kok, J.N. (1991). Towards a complete hierarchy of compositional dataflow models. In: Ito, T., Meyer, A.R. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computer Software. TACS 1991. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 526. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54415-1_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-54415-1_47

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