Game Interpretation of the Deadlock Avoidance Problem

Abstract

The deadlock avoidance problem may be defined informally as the determination, from some a priori information about the processes, resources, operating system, etc., of the “safe situations” which may be realized without endangering the smooth running of the system. When each process specifies its future needs by a flowchart of need-defined steps, a global approach to the phenomenon and its interpretation as a game between the operating system and the processes allows formalization of risk and safety concepts. The bipartite graph representation of this game may then be used to construct explicitly the set of safe states and to study their properties. © 1977, ACM. All rights reserved.