Communication and Concurrency

by Robin Milner

This book is a valuable review of the description and verification of concurrent systems. As one of the leading theoretical computer scientists in Britain, Robin Miller has produced an excellent book containing a well- judged mixture of theory and practical applications. KEY " Includes information on Modelling Communication, Equational Laws and Their Applications, Strong Bisimulation and Strong Equivalence, and more. This book forms a solid base for academic courses and a valuable reference for practitioners.

Genres: Computer Science

260 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1989

Reviews

[Sheffielder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concurrency theory is all about systems that involve lots of components talking together and coordinating their actions according to local rules - and this is the "must-have" book that explains how we can represent these ideas mathematically using a language called CCS, and then use that maths to reason about concurrent systems, whether it be traffic on the roads, social insect colonies, or NASA's proposed "satellite swarms".

For example, we could model the behaviour of individual car drivers in CCS by reflecting the way they navigate through road junctions. Each driver is an individual component of the wider system we call "traffic", and though we make decisions without referrring to each others' concerns, each driver nonetheless influences those around him; you can't get through a junction if the guy in front is still in the way - so your own behaviour depends on his. Milner's CCS and its variants let you model these interactions, and let you reason about individual city traffic schemes; given a good enough model, you can even work out whether your own city is laid out in such a way that it allows gridlock to occur, or whether it's gridlock-free.

Make no mistake - this book is advanced. But undergraduates in mathematics or computer science should have no trouble following it. On the other hand, Milner's work has moved on a long way since he wrote this book, and modern researchers tend to look to his later (and even more advanced) work on the "pi-calculus", looking at how we can model mobility as well as concurrency. But a thorough grounding in CCS remains vital to understanding pi-calculus, and this is the book to provide it.

[DJ]

process algebras