In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC'2000), 8-11 October 2000, Nashville, TN, Vol. 4, pages 3069-3074. 2000.
Abstract: This paper demonstrates the use of supervisory control theory in synthesizing plug-ins for distributed software. The plug-ins are software objects that supervise an existing distributed system so that certain properties such as fairness and deadlock freedom are guaranteed. The distributed application is modeled as a bounded ordinary Petri net and system analysis is accomplished through a partial order method known as unfolding. The unfolding constructs an event structure that provides a natural encapsulation of concurrent threads of execution whose selective disablement by the supervisory plug-in assures the desired property. The synthesis of the plug-in is based on results from supervisory control theory and the synthesized plug-ins are `optimal' in that they are maximally permissive. The approach is illustrated by a distributed cache system.
Keywords: Petri nets, distributed cache systems, dynamic reconfigurations, network unfoldings, partial order methods, software objects.