The anticipated results of this research are: o a methodology for designing concurrent objects that exploits inheritance. The methodology has related components for reasoning about the observable behavior of an object using a formalism based on CCS, expressing that behavior using a new mechanism named behavior sets, and guaranteeing that behavior during execution using the ACT++ prototype based on MCC's ESP distributed object-oriented kernel. o a more mature technology for the garbage collection of active objects. This technology serves not only the specific needs of ACT++ but also contributes to other systems and languages based on concurrent objects or fine-grain processes. o the first realistic comparative study of concurrent object-based languages. This study will employ a common set of medium-scale problems and involve in the evaluation process leading members of the international research community. The enhanced ACT++ prototype system will be made available to other researchers.
