Distributed Computing: Models and Methods

Jan van Leeuwen asked me to write a chapter on distributed systems for this handbook. I realized that I wasn’t familiar enough with the literature on distributed algorithms to write it by myself, so I asked Nancy Lynch to help. I also observed that there was no chapter on assertional verification of concurrent algorithms. (That was probably due to the handbook’s geographical origins, since process algebra rules in Europe.) So I included a major section on proof methods. As I recall, I wrote most of the first three sections and Lynch wrote the fourth section on algorithms pretty much by herself.