Temporal Semantics for Concurrent Metatem

Abstract Concurrent MetateM is a programming language based on the notion of concurrent, communicating objects, where each object directly executes a specification given in temporal logic, and communicates with other objects using asynchronous broadcast message-passing. Thus, Concurrent MetateM represents a combination of the direct execution of temporal specifications, together with a novel model of concurrent computation. In contrast to the notions of predicates as processes and stream parallelism seen in concurrent logic languages, Concurrent MetateM represents a more coarse-grained approach, where an object consists of a set of logical rules and communication is achieved by the evaluation of certain types of predicate. Representing concurrent systems as groups of such objects provides a powerful tool for modelling complex reactive systems. In order to reason about the behaviour of Concurrent MetateM systems, we requir a suitable semantics. Being based upon executable temporal logic, objects in isolation have an intuitive semantics. However, the addition of both operational constraints upon the object's execution and global constraints provided by the asynchronous model of concurrency and communication, complicates the overall semantics of networks of objects. It is this, more complex, semantics that we address here, where temporal semantics for varieties of Concurrent MetateM are provided.

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