Fairness. (English) Zbl 0602.68007

Francez, Nissim

Texts and Monographs in Computer Science. New York etc.: Springer-Verlag. XIII, 295 p. DM 98.00 (1986).

In current computer science literature there is a tendency to collect material rather than to comprehend it. The monography by Francez is an excellent exception. It brings together the results of research activities about fairness, one of the basic notion in the theory of concurrency and nondeterminism, and presents them very concisely and uniformly. The book covers most of the known approaches for proving properties of programs in a variety of fairness notions. The author choses termination as a representative of all properties that depend on fairness and uses Hoare-like proof rules as the main tool in the investigation.
The book is concentrated on two approaches: the method of helpful directions and the method of explicit scheduler. The emphasis is further placed on extensions in various directions: extensions and generalizations of fairness, CSP, CCS, temporal logic. The book is written in sufficiently rigorous as well as readable style and provides a systematic foundation in the subject.
It will be useful to graduate students and can be used in graduate level seminars or specified courses in semantics and program verification.

Reviewer: L.Brim

MSC:

68-02	Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to computer science
68Q60	Specification and verification (program logics, model checking, etc.)
68N25	Theory of operating systems
68Q65	Abstract data types; algebraic specification

Keywords:

concurrency; nondeterminism; proving properties of programs; termination; Hoare-like proof rules; CSP; CCS; temporal logic; program verification