Modeling Embedded Systems and SoC's

Chapter Eight. Nondeterminism and Probability

Nondeterminism, its expressiveness, and its difficulties have played a prominent role in the history of computer science and in the development of computational models. It is symptomatic that we have touched upon it in almost every one of the preceding chapters.

Nondeterminism as a modeling concept is used with two distinct objectives: In its descriptive role (Section 8.1) nondeterminism is used to capture uncertainties in the behavior and timing of a system. In particular it has been used to model the unknown delays of interprocess communication. We review briefly several deterministic (e.g., Kahn process networks and synchronous languages) and nondeterministic (e.g., history relations and process ...