The Concurrency Factory is a visual environment for the design, simulation, verification, and implementation of concurrent/distributed systems such as communication protocols and process control systems. The project, which is a joint effort between SUNY Stony Brook and North Carolina State University, officially started in Spring '92, and is currently supported by grants from NSF, ONR, and AFOSR.
Two themes central to the project are the following: the use of process algebra, e.g., CCS, ACP, CSP, as the underlying formal model of computation, and the provision of practical support for process algebra. By ``practical'' we mean that the Factory should be usable by protocol engineers and software developers who are not necessarily familiar with formal verification, and it should be usable on problems of real-life scale, such as those found in the telecommunications industry.
The main features of the Concurrency Factory are graphical (VTView) and textual (VPL) user interfaces; a suite of analysis routines for automatic verification including a bisimulation and model checker; a graphical simulator for VTView specifications; and a graphical compiler that transforms VTView and VPL specifications into executable code.
In this talk, I will present an overview of the Concurrency Factory; describe some of its early successes, including the detection of a livelock in the communications protocol used by GNU uucp; point out directions for future work; and discuss funding possibilities for Ph.D. and M.S. students.
A surprise guest speaker will take the last 10 minutes to talk about ``Concurrency Theory without the Tears: How to Make the Concurrency Factory Usable by Mere Mortals.''
For more information about the Concurrency Factory, please see:
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~concurr http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~ysr/wrkshp/wrkshp.html http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~clubconc http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~sas (under construction)