Partial orderings of event sets and their application to prototyping concurrent, timed systems

RAPIDE is a concurrent object-oriented language specifically designed for prototyping large concurrent systems. One of the principle design goals has been to adopt a computation model in which the synchronitation, concurrency, dataflow, and timing aspects of a prototype are explicitly represented and easily accessible both to the prototype itself and to the protofyper. This paper describes the partially ordered event set (poset) computation model, and the features of RAPIDE for using posets in reactive prototypes and for automatically checking posets. Some critical issues in ihe implelnentcltion of RAPIDE are described and our experience with them is summarized. An example protoiyplng scenaGo illustraies uses of the pose2 computation model.