Formalizing Errors in CCS with 3-Valued Logic

Concurrent and distributed systems are often prone to failures. Errors in modeling an agent's behavior can propagate into large interacting systems with unexpected consequences. In this paper, we propose a theory for the process algebra CCS enriched with a formal and explicit representation of errors based on McCarthy's style three-valued logic, which includes the traditional Boolean values and a third error value. In this setting, we formally study how the emergence of local errors may or may not result in propagation, as also emphasized in a real-world case study modeling a distributed microservices architecture.