Process calculi for modelling mobile, service-oriented, and collective autonomic systems

Abstract

Process-algebraic methods have proven to be excellent tools for designing and analysing concurrent systems. In this paper we review several process calculi and languages developed and studied by Rocco De Nicola and his students and colleagues in the three EU projects AGILE, SENSORIA, and ASCENS. These calculi provide a theoretical basis for engineering mobile, service-oriented, and collective autonomic systems. KLAIM is a framework for distributed mobile agents consisting of a kernel language, a stochastic extension, a logic for specifying properties of mobile applications, and an automatic tool for verifying such properties. In the AGILE project of the EU Global Computing Initiative I, KLAIM served as a the process-algebraic basis for an architectural approach to mobile systems development. For modelling and analysing service-oriented systems, a family of process-algebraic core calculi was developed in the SENSORIA project of the EU Global Computing Initiative II. These calculi address complementary aspects of service-oriented programming such as sessions and correlations. They come with reasoning and analysis techniques, specification and verification tools as well as prototypical analyses of case studies. In the ASCENS project, the language SCEL was developed for modelling and programming systems consisting of interactive autonomic components. SCEL is based on process-algebraic principles and supports formal description and analysis of the behaviours of ensembles of autonomic components.