The application of supervisory control to deadlock avoidance in concurrent software

Abstract

Abstract-Ensuring deadlock-free execution of concurrent programs is a notoriously difficult problem, but an increasingly important one as multicore processors compel performanceconscious software developers to parallelize applications. We propose and validate a novel methodology for dynamically controlling the execution of concurrent software in order to provably avoid deadlocks. The methodology is based on supervisory control of discrete event systems modeled by Petri nets. Specifically, we synthesize feedback controllers for concurrent programs based on the theory of supervision based on place invariants and implement the controllers online to guarantee deadlock avoidance. We describe a full implementation of this methodology and report initial experimental results demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability.

Modelling and Control of Resource Allocation Systems within Discrete Event Systems by Means of Petri Nets -- Part 1: Invariants, Siphons and Traps in Deadlock Avoidance

“…On the other hand, there exist newer papers -e.g. [63,8,25,55,56,57,59,62,64,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,92,93,94,91,88,89,65,66,67,68,69,58,60,61,47,48,49,50,51,52,53]. They bring very interesting contributions in the form of new approaches how to deal with deadlocks by means of siphons, as it already was mentioned in Section 2.5.…”

“…Of course, since that time the deadlock theory, and especially the deadlock avoidance one, has been intensively developed -see e.g. [46,78,79,80,81,75,74,73,82,86,87] and especially [63,8,25,55,56,57,59,62,64,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,92,93,94,91,88,89,65,66,67,68,69,58,60,61,47,48,49,50,51,…”

“…The special syntactic characteristics of this class allow to study the modelled systems from a structural perspective. The newer publications [63,8,25,55,56,57,59,62,64,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,92,93,94,91,88,89,65,66,67,68,69,58,60,61,47,48,49,50,51,52,53] investigate also such kinds of AMS/FMS.…”

“…In case of the approach based on P -invariants most important contributions can be seen in [42,43,71,88,89], but also in many other works. However, in about the last two decades the siphon-based approach dominates among the methodologies that deal with the deadlock analysis and control of resource allocation systems.…”

“…This research has uncovered many useful results. Very important share on the development of the siphon-based approach to deadlock avoiding have the works [63,8,25,55,56,57,59,62,64,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,92,93,94,91,88,89,65,66,67,68,69,58,60,61,47,48,49,50,51,52,53], but also some others. The new controllability condition for siphons is presented in [56].…”