Predicting global usages of resources endowed with local policies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal model and static analysis method to predict resource usage issues in distributed applications by considering local policies and global properties of resources.

Contribution

It extends pi-calculus with resource management primitives and develops a control flow analysis to statically approximate resource behaviors and detect potential bad usages.

Findings

Effective prediction of resource misuses in distributed systems

Formal extension of pi-calculus for resource modeling

Static analysis approach for resource behavior approximation

Abstract

The effective usages of computational resources are a primary concern of up-to-date distributed applications. In this paper, we present a methodology to reason about resource usages (acquisition, release, revision, ...), and therefore the proposed approach enables to predict bad usages of resources. Keeping in mind the interplay between local and global information occurring in the application-resource interactions, we model resources as entities with local policies and global properties governing the overall interactions. Formally, our model takes the shape of an extension of pi-calculus with primitives to manage resources. We develop a Control Flow Analysis computing a static approximation of process behaviour and therefore of the resource usages.