A Timed Concurrent Constraint Language

We study a timed concurrent constraint language, called tccp, which is obtained by a natural timed interpretation of the usual ccp constructs: action-prefixing is interpreted as the next-time operator and the parallel execution of agents follows the scheduling policy of maximal parallelism. Additionally, tccp includes a simple primitive which allows one to specify timing constraints. We define the operational semantics of tccp by means of a transition system and we define a denotational model which is fully abstract with respect to the usual notion of observables (that is, the results of terminating computations). Moreover, we study the semantics and expressive power of the notion of maximal parallelism underlying the computational model of tccp: We define a fully abstract semantics for a sublanguage of tccp, called ccpm, which essentially is concurrent con- straint programming, provided that we interpret the parallel operator in terms of maximal parallelism rather than of interleaving. We show that tccp is strictly more expressive than ccpm which, in its turn, is strictly more expressive than ccp.