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Recognizing safety and liveness

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Abstract

A formal characterization for safety properties and liveness properties is given in terms of the structure of the Buchi automaton that specifies the property. The characterizations permit a property to be decomposed into a safety property and a liveness property whose conjunction is the original. The characterizations also give insight into techniques required to prove a large class of safety and liveness properties.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, 10598, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Bowen Alpern

  2. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, 14853, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Fred B. Schneider

Authors
  1. Bowen Alpern
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  2. Fred B. Schneider
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Additional information

Bowen Alpern was born in 1952. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1986. Currently, he is a Research Staff Member in the Mathematics Department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Fred B. Schneider is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook in 1978 and a B.S. from Cornell in 1975. Schneider is a member of the editorial boards of Distributed Computing and Information Processing Letters. He is also a member of the U.S. Army Committee on Recommendations for Basic Research, the College Board Committe for Advanced Placement Computer Science, IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology), and the Standing Organizing Committee for Principles of Distributed Computing Conferences. He has served on the program committee for PODC, POPL, SOSP, and FTCS.

This work is supported, in part, by NSF Grant DCR-8320274 and Office of Naval Research contract N00014-86-K-0092

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Alpern, B., Schneider, F.B. Recognizing safety and liveness. Distrib Comput 2, 117–126 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01782772

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