A knowledge-based system for debugging distributed programs

A knowledge-based system for debugging distributed programs is presented. This debugging system is designed to support the specification and debugging phases of the development of distributed software.;A knowledge-base feature is integrated into DEBL to support uniform views of structures of knowledge-base components and user-defined processes. Mutual exclusion and deadlock detection examples are used to demonstrate the application of this structure. A fault detection mechanism is to be carried out distributively to increase efficiency. Three Merging Algorithms, which help to determine the group of most probable faulty processes, are also developed to automate the processing of debugging information for both asynchronous and synchronous IPC communication mechanisms.;We have proved that DEBL has more expressive power than Path Expressions and Predicate Path Expressions by showing that they are proper subsets of DEBL. A qualitative comparison of DEBL with other important languages is also presented. Furthermore, a time complexity analysis of all three Merging Algorithms has been conducted. It is shown that Merging Algorithms I and II, which manage synchronous and asynchronous IPC mechanisms, respectively, have the same time complexity of O(;A distributed event-based language (DEBL) has been developed to specify the behavior of distributed programs. An inter-process communication (IPC) message is regarded as the basic event unit which makes DEBL independent of programming language implementation. DEBL provides an event hierarchy to conform to a programmer's logical concepts and is equipped with temporal operators to express time-related properties. The semantics of DEBL is based on a new formal temporal logic system- Temporal Event Logic (TEL). Thus DEBL is not only a convenient and expressive tool but also retains the rigorous deduction power of a logic system. The syntax and semantics model of TEL have also been specified. Together, DEBL and TEL are the inference engines of this debugging system where DEBL acts as the front end processor of TEL.