A specification structure for deadlock-freedom of synchronous processes

Abstract

Many different notions of “program property”, and many different methods of verifying such properties, arise naturally in programming. We present a general framework of Specification Structures for combining different notions and methods in a coherent fashion. We then apply the idea of specification structures to concurrency in the setting of Interaction Categories. As a specific example, a certain specification structure defined over the interaction category ^GProc yields a new category ^GProc_D in which morphisms are deadlock-free concurrent processes and composition is process interaction. ^GProc_D is obtained from ^GProc by adding specification information to the objects which is strong enough to guarantee deadlock-freedom. The main technical contribution is to show that this can be done in a way which is preserved by composition. The methods used to achieve this can be seen as a semantic analogue of those used to prove strong normalization in classical linear logic.