Fairness in systems based on multiparty interactions

In the context of the Multiparty Interaction Model, fairness is used to insure that an interaction that is enabled sufficiently often in a concurrent program will eventually be selected for execution. Unfortunately, this notion does not take conspiracies into account, i.e. situations in which an interaction never becomes enabled because of an unfortunate interleaving of independent actions; furthermore, eventual execution is usually too weak for practical purposes since this concept can only be used in the context of infinite executions. In this article, we present a new fairness notion, k-conspiracy-free fairness, that improves on others because it takes finite executions into account, alleviates conspiracies that are not inherent to a program, and k may be set a priori to control its goodness to address the above-mentioned problems. Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-2000-1106-C02-01 Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología FIT-150100-2001-78 Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TAMANSI PCB-02-001