Summary: Fairness and Hyperfairness in
Multi­party Interactions
Paul C. Attie 1;2 Nissim Francez 2;3 Orna Grumberg 3
1. Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
2. Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, Austin, Texas, USA
3. Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa, Israel
August 7, 1992
Abstract
In this paper, a new fairness notion is proposed for languages with multi­party interactions as the sole interprocess synchro­
nization and communication primitive. The main advantage of this fairness notion is the elimination of starvation occurring
solely due to race conditions (i.e., ordering of independent actions). Also, this is the first fairness notion for such languages
which is fully­adequate with respect to the criteria presented in [2]. The paper defines the notion, proves its properties, and
presents examples of its usefulness.

1 Introduction
Fairness is one of the most important classes of liveness properties employed by languages for nondeterministic,
concurrent and distributed programs and by their underlying models of computation. This importance stems from
the semantic intricacies of constructs in such languages, which makes the verification of typical progress properties
(e.g., eventual response to a request for service) difficult. One source of difficulty is the phenomenon of conspiracies.
A conspiracy occurs if a request for service is never granted because conflicting requests intermittently engage some

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

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences