Detecting Atomic Sequences of Predicates in Distributed Computations

This paper deals with a class of unstable non-monotonic global predicates, called herein atomic sequences of predicates. Such global predicates are defined for distributed programs built with message-passing communication only (no shared memory) and they describe global properties by causal composition of local predicates augmented with atomicity constraints. These constraints specify forbidden properties, whose occurrence invalidate causal sequences. This paper defines formally these atomic sequences of predicates, proposes a distributed algorithm to detect their occurrences and gives a sketch of a proof of correctness of this algorithm.