A Concurrent Object Coordination Language: Semantics and Applications

All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisor: Dr. M. Cheng The Timed Actor model is a concurrent coordination model which extends the basic Actor model of [1] by providing timers and facilities for atomic message processing with local checkpointing. The semantics of our Timed Actor model allows the specification of a timed actor language called COOL, and a virtual machine to accommodate our timed actor language. COOL is the basis of our approach for modelling and implementing distributed applications. COOL provides a high-level description language for specifying the interface, behaviour and coordination of actors. COOL allows a practitioner to specify the expected behaviour of actors by defining the performance and coordination properties of actors. These checkable properties are compilable into online monitors. At run-time monitored activity (observed behaviour) is logged in a format amenable to offline trace analysis. Our trace analyzer validates a COOL specification by comparing observed to expected behaviour. Examiners