Patent ID: 7007004

Claim:
A method for operating state machines concurrently in a computing system, wherein the method comprises the steps of: generating one or more state machine families, each family comprising one master state machine type for receiving service requests from outside its family and for forwarding the received service requests for servicing, and one or more slave state machine types for receiving and servicing the forwarded service requests, the master state machine type instantiated as one master instance and at least one slave state machine type instantiated as one or more slave instances, each instance having a message queue of its own, allocating to one or more generated state machine families a thread pool, each thread pool being specific to one state machine family and comprising one or more threads for executing the master instance and slave instances of the corresponding state machine family, and assigning state machine instances of one or more generated state machine families to corresponding threads of the allocated thread pools for execution, a given instance being executed by no more than one thread at any given time and a given thread executing no more than one instance at any given time.