Concurrent systems abound in human experience but their
fully adequate conceptualization as yet eludes our most able
thinkers. The COSY (ConcurrentSystem) notation and theory
was developed in the last decade as one of a number of
mathematical approaches for conceptualizing and analyzing
concurrent and reactive systems.
The COSY approach extends theconventional notions of
grammar and automaton from formal language and automata
theory to collections of "synchronized" grammars and
automata, permitting system specification and analysis of
"true" concurrency without reduction to non-determinism.
COSY theory is developed to a great level of detail and
constitutes the first uniform and self-contained
presentationof all results about COSY published in the
past, as well as including many new results.
COSY theory is used to analyze a sufficient number of
typical problems involving concurrency, synchronization and
scheduling, to allow the reader to apply the techniques
presented tosimilar problems.
The COSY model is also related to many alternative models of
concurrency, particularly Petri Nets, Communicating
Sequential Processes and the Calculus of Communicating
Systems.