Temporal Interaction Diagrams

This chapter introduces a novel notion of temporal interaction diagrams for distributed and parallel programming. An interaction diagram is a graphical view of computation processes and communication between different entities in distributed and parallel processes. It can be used for the specification, implementation and testing of interaction policies in distributed and parallel systems. Expressing interaction diagrams in a linear form, known as fragmentation, facilitates automation of design and testing of such systems. Existing interaction diagram formalisms lack the flexibility and capability of describing more general temporal order constraints. They only support rigid temporal order, and hence have limited semantic expressiveness. We propose an improved interaction diagram formalism in which more general temporal constraints can be expressed. This enables us of capturing multiple valid interaction sequences using a single interaction diagram.