Concurrent Programming in Java
© 1996-1999 Doug Lea

3.5 Joint Actions

Follow-ups

Readings and Resources

Joint actions serve as a unifying framework for characterizing multiparty actions in the DisCo modeling and specification language:

Jarvinen, Hannu-Matti, Reino Kurki-Suonio, Markku Sakkinnen and Kari Systa. "Object-Oriented Specification of Reactive Systems", Proceedings, 1990 International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE, 1990.

They are further pursued in a slightly different context in IP, which also addresses different senses of fairness that may apply to joint action designs. For example, designs for some problems avoid conspiracies among some participants to starve out others. See:

Francez, Nissim, and Ira Forman. Interacting Processes, ACM Press, 1996.

For a wide-ranging survey of other approaches to task coordination among objects and processes, see:

Malone, Thomas, and Kevin Crowston. "The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination", ACM Computing Surveys, March 1994.

Joint action frameworks can provide the basis for implementing the internal mechanisms supporting distributed protocols. For some forward-looking presentations and analyses of protocols among concurrent and distributed objects, see:

Rosenschein, Jeffrey, and Gilad Zlotkin. Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation Among Computers, MIT Press, 1994.
Fagin, Ronald, Joseph Halpern, Yoram Moses, and Moshe Vardi. Reasoning about Knowledge, MIT Press, 1995.

A joint action framework that accommodates failures among participants is described in:

Stroud, Robert, and Avelino Zorzo. "A Distributed Object-Oriented Framework for Dependable Multiparty Interactions", Proceedings of OOPSLA, ACM, 1999.

Doug Lea

Last modified: Sun Oct 17 08:25:17 EDT 1999