Fair Termination for Resource-Aware Active Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a core calculus for resource-aware active objects and a type system that guarantees fair termination, combining graded semantics and fair termination techniques for concurrent distributed systems.

Contribution

It develops a formal model and type system ensuring fair termination in resource-aware active object systems, a novel combination of existing techniques.

Findings

Type system guarantees fair termination of programs

Formal calculus models resource-aware active objects

Combines graded semantics with fair termination methods

Abstract

Active object systems are a model of distributed computation that has been adopted for modelling distributed systems and business process workflows. This field of modelling is, in essence, concurrent and resource-aware, motivating the development of resource-aware formalisations on the active object model. The contributions of this work are the development of a core calculus for resource-aware active objects together with a type system ensuring that well-typed programs are fairly terminating, i.e., they can always eventually terminate. To achieve this, we combine techniques from graded semantics and type systems, which are quite well understood for sequential programs, with those for fair termination, which have been developed for synchronous~sessions.