Abstract. We introduce spatial and epistemic process calculi for reasoning about spatial information and knowledge distributed among the agents of a system. We introduce domain-theoretical structures to represent spatial and epistemic information. We provide operational and denotational techniques for reasoning about the potentially infinite behaviour of spatial and epistemic processes. We also give compact representations of infinite objects that can be used by processes to simulate announcements of common knowledge and global information.Introduction. Distributed systems have changed substantially in the recent past with the advent of phenomena like social networks and cloud computing. In the previous incarnation of distributed computing [16] the emphasis was on consistency, fault tolerance, resource management and related topics; these were all characterized by interaction between processes. Research proceeded along two lines: the algorithmic side which dominated the Principles Of Distributed Computing conferences and the more process algebraic approach epitomized by CONCUR where the emphasis was on developing compositional reasoning principles. What marks the new era of distributed systems is an emphasis on managing access to information to a much greater degree than before.Epistemic concepts were crucial in distributed computing as was realized in the mid 1980s with Halpern and Moses' groundbreaking paper on common knowledge [13]. This led to a flurry of activity in the next few years [11] with many distributed protocols being understood from an epistemic point of view. The impact of epistemic ideas in the concurrency theory community was slower in coming. In an invited talk by one of us [20] at a joint PODC-CONCUR conference in 2008, this point was emphasized and a plea was made for epistemic ideas to be exploited more by concurrency theorists.The goal of the present paper is simple: to put epistemic concepts in the hands of programmers rather than just appearing in post-hoc theoretical analyses. One could imagine the incorporation of these ideas in a variety of process algebraic settings -and indeed we expect that such formalisms will appear in due course -but what is particularly appealing about the concurrent constraint programming (ccp) paradigm [24,25] is that it was designed to give programmers explicit access to the concept of partial information and, as such, had close ties with logic [21,18]. This makes it ideal for the incorporation of epistemic concepts by expanding the logical connections to include modal logic [15]. In particular, agents posting and querying information in the presence of spatial hierarchies for sharing information and knowledge, e.g. friend circles and
The ntcc calculus is a model of non-deterministic temporal concurrent constraint programming. In this paper we study behavioral notions for this calculus. In the underlying computational model, concurrent constraint processes are executed in discrete time intervals. The behavioral notions studied reflect the reactive interactions between concurrent constraint processes and their environment, as well as internal interactions between individual processes. Relationships between the suggested notions are studied, and they are all proved to be decidable for a substantial fragment of the calculus. Furthermore, the expressive power of this fragment is illustrated by examples.
Abstract. Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a well-established model for concurrency. Bisimilarity is one of the central reasoning techniques in concurrency. The standard definition of bisimilarity, however, is not completely satisfactory for ccp since it yields an equivalence that is too fine grained. By building upon recent foundational investigations, we introduce a labelled transition semantics and a novel notion of bisimilarity that is fully abstract w.r.t. the typical observational equivalence in ccp.
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