On fairness as an abstraction for the design of distributed systems

A fairness property, called U-fairness, is studied in the context of the design of distributed systems with multiparty interactions. This is done with an overlapping model of concurrency. A distributed algorithm implementing the fairness notion is presented. U-fairness is shown to be more appropriate to the design of distributed systems than other known fairness notions because it provides an abstraction for stable property detection whereas the other fairness notions do not.