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Time for All Programs, Not Just Real-Time Programs

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation (ISoLA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13036))

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Abstract

We argue that the utility of time as a semantic property of software is not limited to the domain of real-time systems. This paper outlines four concurrent design patterns: alignment, precedence, simultaneity, and consistency, all of which are relevant to general-purpose software applications. We show that a semantics of logical time provides a natural framework for reasoning about concurrency, makes some difficult problems easy, and offers a quantified interpretation of the CAP theorem, enabling quantified evaluation of the tradeoff between consistency and availability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lingua Franca actually uses a richer model of time called “superdense time,” but this is irrelevant to the present discussion, so we simplify to just refer to timestamps.

  2. 2.

    The federated infrastructure of Lingua Franca is currently rather preliminary, being built by Soroush Bateni and the two of us, but it is sufficiently developed for the examples described in this paper.

  3. 3.

    The diagram synthesis infrastructure was created by Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten of the University of Kiel using the graphical layout tools from the KIELER Lightweight Diagrams framework [33] (see https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/kieler).

  4. 4.

    The name of this problem illustrates how cultural norms have changed. In 1971, there was little cultural stigma around smoking cigarettes, and it was relatively common for smokers to roll their own.

  5. 5.

    See for example OpenCSF: https://w3.cs.jmu.edu/kirkpams/OpenCSF/Books/csf/html/CigSmokers.html, although, unfortunately, the solution given there still exhibits the possibility of a form of deadlock, where one thread repeatedly, unfairly acquires a semaphore in a busy wait.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the following people for their contributions to the design and implementation of Lingua Franca: Soroush Bateni, Shaokai Lin, Christian Menard, Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, and Matt Weber. The work in this paper was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) award #CNS-1836601 (Reconciling Safety with the Internet) and the iCyPhy (Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems) research center, supported by Denso, Siemens, and Toyota.

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  1. UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Edward A. Lee & Marten Lohstroh

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  1. Edward A. Lee
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Correspondence to Edward A. Lee .

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  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Lee, E.A., Lohstroh, M. (2021). Time for All Programs, Not Just Real-Time Programs. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. ISoLA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13036. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89159-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89159-6_15

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