Local fairness typically between strong and weak fairness (conjecture)

Investigate whether local fairness assumptions employed in specifications of distributed systems are generally positioned strictly between strong fairness and weak fairness, and determine the conditions under which this positioning holds across applications.

Background

The authors distinguish global fairness (applied uniformly) from local fairness (justified for particular scheduling scenarios). In their prior work on AODV using AWN and LTL, the needed local fairness assumptions were strictly between strong and weak fairness. They conjecture this pattern is common, motivating systematic investigation.

References

Interestingly, the local fairness assumptions we needed in that work can be positioned strictly between strong and weak fairness. I conjecture that this will be the case for many applications.

— Ensuring Liveness Properties of Distributed Systems: Open Problems  (1912.05616 - Glabbeek, 2019) in Task “A framework for modelling distributed systems”, Section “A research agenda”