An MDA-Based Approach for Inferring Concurrency in Distributed Systems

When dealing with distributed systems, one of the most important problems that has to be addressed is concurrency. Distributed systems are inherently concurrent, distributed objects being implicitly "shared" between all participating clients, and explicit concurrency control must be enforced if consistency is to be preserved. From an MDA perspective to software development, we show in this paper how concurrency resulting from distribution can be inferred in an automatic way, provided that a small set of design conventions are strictly adhered to. A simple PIM-level concurrency profile is considered in order to illustrate how the inference algorithm evolves on a concrete example and how an initial distributed design is automatically refined according to the proposed concurrency profile.