Reversible Multiparty Sessions with Checkpoints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework for reversible multiparty communication sessions with checkpoints, enabling interactions to be undone or revisited, ensuring reliable and flexible communication protocols.

Contribution

It extends multiparty session types with checkpoints and rollback capabilities, providing a typed model that guarantees session fidelity and progress in reversible interactions.

Findings

Model supports rollback to checkpoints in multiparty sessions

Type system ensures session fidelity and progress

Enables flexible interaction scenarios like negotiations

Abstract

Reversible interactions model different scenarios, like biochemical systems and human as well as automatic negotiations. We abstract interactions via multiparty sessions enriched with named checkpoints. Computations can either go forward or roll back to some checkpoints, where possibly different choices may be taken. In this way communications can be undone and different conversations may be tried. Interactions are typed with global types, which control also rollbacks. Typeability of session participants in agreement with global types ensures session fidelity and progress of reversible communications.