Role-Based Declarative Synchronization for Reconfigurable Systems

In this paper we address the problem of encoding complex concurrency control in reconfigurable systems. Such systems can be often reconfigured, either statically, or dynamically, in order to adapt to new requirements and a changing environment. We therefore take a declarative approach and introduce a set of high-level programming abstractions which allow the programmer to easily express complex synchronization constraints in multithreaded programs. The constructs are based on our model of role-based synchronization (RBS) which assumes attaching roles to concurrent threads and expressing a synchronization policy between the roles. The model is illustrated by describing an experimental implementation of our language as a design pattern library in OCaml. Finally, we also sketch a small application of a web access server that we have implemented using the RBS design pattern.