Deciding reachability in mobile ambients

Abstract

Mobile Ambiants has been proposed by Cardelli and Gordon as a foundational calculus for mobile computing. Since its introduction, the computational strength as well as the decidability of properties have been investigated for several fragments and variants of the standard calculus. We tackle the problem of reachability and we characterize a public (i.e., restriction free) fragment for which it is decidable. This fragment is obtained by removing the open capability and restricting the use of replication to guarded processes. Quite surprisingly, this fragment has been shown to be Turing complete by Maffeis and Phillips. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.