An upper bound for the equational specification of finite state services

Abstract

The communication mechanism between client and server tasks can be modeled by a simple rendezvous model. The intuition here is that a process— the client—when executed places its requests into a request buffer. These requests are taken from the buffer by another process—the server. After some processing, prescribed by actions of the server, the server returns a Boolean reply indicating success or failure of the request. In this note—which is an adaptation of a contribution to the Liber Amicorum in honor of the 50th birthday of John-Jules Meyer- we shall describe the algebra of state services which corresponds to the server side of the communication model.