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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Brian RandellORCiD, Emeritus Professor Alexander RomanovskyORCiD, Dr Robert Stroud, Avelino Zorzo
The Coordinated Atomic Action (or CA action) concept is a unified scheme for coordinating complex concurrent activities and supporting error recovery between multiple interacting components in a distributed object system. It provides a conceptual framework for dealing with different kinds of concurrency and achieving fault tolerance by integrating and extending two complementary concepts - conversations and transactions. Conversations (enhanced with concurrent exception handling) are used to control cooperative concurrency and to implement coordinated error recovery whilst transactions are used to maintain the consistency of shared resources in the presence of failures and competitive concurrency. This paper first presents a formal description of the CA action concept based on a linear-time temporal logic system and then demonstrates the practical utility of CA actions through an industrial safety-critical application - the Fault-Tolerant Production Cell case study. A description of an experimental prototype implementation of CA actions is used to illustrate how support can be provided to the application layer for developing fault-tolerant programs that use CA actions as a structuring tool.
Author(s): Randell B, Romanovsky A, Stroud RJ, Xu J, Zorzo AF, Schwier D, von Henke F
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 1998
Pages: 24
Report Number: 628
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/628.pdf
