A Survey and Analysis of Existing Constraint Combination Formalisms and Their Applications to Software Systems Having Client-Server Relationships

Task graph representations of complex software systems often require the specification of multiple constraints upon the execution of a single task. In this paper, existing formalisms associated with this type of specification and their underlying execution models are discussed. These formalisms are analyzed from different structural levels of the software system to identify their limitations in describing systems having client-server relationships. In these types of software systems, the combination of the precedence constraints must support the dynamic job structure of the system. Existing formalisms do not offer this support while accurately representing the desired behavior of the software.