Formal Verification for the Absence of Deadlock in the Manager Workers Pattern

The Architectural Patterns for Parallel Programming are descriptions of the fundamental organizational features of common toplevel coordinations observed in parallel software systems. They represent a means to capture and express experience in the design and development process of parallel software. Nevertheless, by now, these software patterns have been described in informal terms, in which very little can be stated about the properties present in the final parallel software system. The present paper presents an initial approach for studying and documenting logical properties of an architectural pattern for parallel programming. In particular, the objective here is to formally verify the property known as “absence of deadlock” for the Manager-Workers pattern, a widely used architectural pattern for parallel programming, by means of formal verification using CCS and μ-calculus. The aim is to establish under what conditions this architectural pattern is deadlock-free, and whether this formal verification can be ported later to other Architectural Patterns for Parallel Programming.