Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

2.3. The process concept

The style of modular specification outlined above gives a description of the components of a system and gives the intuition that the components interact as the system executes dynamically. We know that methods are invoked on objects and that the object's set of methods defines its possible behaviour. In Figure 2.3 we saw a thread of control pass from the object containing method A to the object containing method B and back, then to the object containing method C and back, when methods were invoked. We now focus on the dynamic execution of a system: the events that cause method invocations and the order in which invocations take place.

As well as an object model, a computational model is therefore required with a notion ...