A BDD-Based Approach for Designing Maximally Permissive Deadlock Avoidance Policies for Complex Resource Allocation Systems

Journal article, 2015

In order to develop a computationally efficient implementation of the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance policy (DAP) for complex resource allocation systems (RAS), a recent approach focuses on the identification of a set of critical states of the underlying RAS state-space, referred to as minimal boundary unsafe states. The availability of this information enables an expedient one-step-lookahead scheme that prevents the RAS from reaching outside its safe region. The work presented in this paper seeks to develop a symbolic approach, based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs), for efficiently retrieving the (minimal) boundary unsafe states from the underlying RAS state-space. The presented results clearly demonstrate that symbolic computation enables the deployment of the maximally permissive DAP for complex RAS with very large structure and state-spaces with limited time and memory requirements. Furthermore, the involved computational costs are substantially reduced through the pertinent exploitation of the special structure that exists in the considered problem.