The combinatorics of resource sharing

TL;DR

This paper explores the combinatorial structures underlying resource-sharing computations, focusing on deadlock models, algorithms, policies, and concurrency issues, with an emphasis on graph theory and partial orders.

Contribution

It provides a unified framework using graph theory and combinatorics to analyze resource sharing, deadlocks, and concurrency control mechanisms.

Findings

Graph-theoretic models elucidate deadlock conditions.

Coloring concepts relate to resource allocation strategies.

Structural insights inform deadlock prevention policies.

Abstract

We discuss general models of resource-sharing computations, with emphasis on the combinatorial structures and concepts that underlie the various deadlock models that have been proposed, the design of algorithms and deadlock-handling policies, and concurrency issues. These structures are mostly graph-theoretic in nature, or partially ordered sets for the establishment of priorities among processes and acquisition orders on resources. We also discuss graph-coloring concepts as they relate to resource sharing.