Concurrency Control in Rule-Based Software Development Environments
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the concurrency control problem in software development environments (SDEs). The problem arises when multiple developers perform activities that concurrently access the project's components, stored as database objects. The interleaved execution of the developers' activities leads to interference if they access overlapping sets of objects concurrently. An SDE can ensure that activities never interfere by modeling their execution in terms of atomic transactions and allowing only serializable schedules. This prevents cooperation, which requires some degree of interference between the activities of multiple developers. To allow cooperation. an SDE must be provided with semantic information about development activities. In rule- based SDEs, the necessary information is readily available in the set of rules that defines the process model of a project. The rules are loaded into the SDE, which provides process-specific assistance through a rule chaining engine. A single user command might lead the chaining engine to initiate a rule chain The concurrency control problem in rule-based SDEs manifests itself in terms of interference between concurrent rule chains. We present a mechanism that extracts semantic information from the process model to solve the concurrency control problem without obstructing cooperation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1992
- Accession Number
- ADA267829
Entities
People
- Naser S. Barghouti
Organizations
- Columbia University