October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column

I have just submitted the material for the October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column. This instalment of the column consists of a double bill:

• Interval Temporal Logics: a Journey by Dario Della Monica, Valentin Goranko, Angelo Montanari and Guido Sciavicco. [PDF]
• Assertional and Behavioral approaches to concurrency by Uri Abraham. [PDF]

The first piece is a survey  devoted to interval temporal logics. The article presents the main developments in the study of interval temporal logics over the past 10 years (a field of research to which the authors have contributed substantially) and outlines some landmark results on expressiveness and (un)decidability of the satisfiability problem for the family of interval logics. The authors give us a guided tour of this body of work, which, to my mind, deserves to be better known within the concurrency-theory community.

The second contribution is a a piece by Uri Abraham in which he compares two proofs of the mutual-exclusion property for the well known algorithm by Peterson: an assertional proof and a behavioural one. The article outlines a framework within which the behavioural approach can be formalized in a way that retains the intuitive content of the behavioural reasoning.

This is my last issue as editor of the Concurrency Column. I have been editing the column for the last eight years, and I feel that it is time to step down. The column will benefit greatly from a fresh perspective on the world of concurrency theory and I look forward to reading the pieces that will appear in future issues.I thank the contributors to the Concurrency Column over the last eight years and all my readers.