Reasoning about causality between distributed nonatomic events

摘要

The complex events in distributed applications such as industrial process control, avionics, navigation, planning, robotics, diagnostics, virtual reality, and temporal and geographic databases, are realistically modeled by nonatomic events. This paper derives and studies causality relations between nonatomic distributed events in the execution of a complex distributed application. Such causality relations are useful because they provide a fine level of discrimination in the specification of the relative timing relations and synchronization conditions between the nonatomic events. The paper then proposes a set of axioms on the proposed causality relations. The set of axioms provides a mechanism for temporal and spatial reasoning with the set of relations and can be used to derive all possible implications from any valid predicate on the proposed relations.