Summary: Efficiently Verifiable Sufficient Conditions
for Deadlock­freedom of Large Concurrent Programs
(Technical Report)
Paul C. Attie and Hana Chockler
College of Computer Science, Northeastern University,
Cullinane Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue,
Boston, Massachusetts 02115.
Email: fattie,hanacg@ccs.neu.edu
May 17, 2004
Abstract
We present two polynomial­time algorithms for automatic verification of deadlock­freedom of
large finite­state concurrent programs. We consider shared­memory concurrent programs in which
a process can nondeterministically choose amongst several (enabled) actions at any step. Our al­
gorithms are sound but incomplete: if they return a positive answer, then the program is indeed
deadlock­free, while a negative answer conveys no information: the program might be deadlock free,
but ``fails'' the test that our algorithms apply.
Our algorithms apply to programs which are expressed in a particular syntactic form, in which
variables are shared between pairs of processes, and the synchronization code for each pair of inter­
acting processes is expressed separately from synchronization code for other (even intersecting) pairs
of processes. The first algorithm is an improvement of the deadlock check of [2]. Its complexity is

Source: Attie, Paul - Department of Computer Science, American University of Beirut

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences