A fair calculus of communicating systems (Q793508)

This paper is a fuller version of a paper with the same title which appeared in the proceedings of 'Foundations of Computation Theory' 1983, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 158, 94-105 (1983; Zbl 0517.68050). It is concerned with an operational approach to fairness, the problem of defining and generating the fair execution sequences of a concurrent language. One solution invokes two semantic levels: one level (the positive) prescribes the finite and infinite execution sequences without regard to their fairness while the other (the negative) filters out the unfair ones. The first level is given as a set of generative rules whereas the second is encoded as a definition of fair execution sequences. Entirely positive approaches have been proposed which appeal to random assignment. Here an alternative positive approach for a subset of Milner's CCS is presented. It is shown that rules can be given for generating just the fair sequences which avoid random assignment. [In a more recent paper by the same authors, ''Weak and Strong Fairness in CCS'', Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 176, 245-254 (1984), analogous results are obtained for a richer subset of CCS.]