A principled exploration of coordination models

Coordination is a style of interaction in which information exchange among independent system components is accomplished by means of high-level constructs designed to enhance the degree of decoupling among participants. A decoupled mode of computation is particularly important in the design of mobil...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theoretical computer science 2005, Vol.336 (2), p.367-401
Main Authors: Roman, Gruia-Catalin, Payton, Jamie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agents
Coordination
Formal specification
Mobility
Modeling
Schema
Verification
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Coordination is a style of interaction in which information exchange among independent system components is accomplished by means of high-level constructs designed to enhance the degree of decoupling among participants. A decoupled mode of computation is particularly important in the design of mobile systems which emerge dynamically through the composition of independently developed components meeting under unpredictable circumstances and thrust into achieving purposeful cooperative behaviors. This paper examines a range of coordination models tailored for use in mobile computing and shows that the constructs they provide are reducible to simple schema definitions in Mobile UNITY. Intellectually, this exercise contributes to achieving a better operational-level understanding of the relation among several important classes of models of mobility. Pragmatically, this work demonstrates the immediate applicability of Mobile UNITY to the formal specification of coordination constructs supporting mobile computing. Moreover, the resulting schemas are shown to be helpful in reducing the complexity of the formal verification effort.
ISSN:0304-3975
1879-2294
DOI:10.1016/j.tcs.2004.11.012