Foundations of Actor Computation

Status

Inactive.

The goal of this project is the development of rigorous semantic foundations for actor computation.

Here are a few features of the models we developed.

• A rigorous reworking of the Actor model of computation
• Operational semantics of executions given.
• Only fair executions considered, for unfair executions never arise in practice.
• Observational equivalence and methods for proving observational equivalence in the presence of fairness are defined.
• Explicit, dynamic modeling of external agents and their interactions.

Publications

• G. Agha, I. Mason, S. Smith, C. Talcott, A Foundation for Actor Computation. Journal of Functional Programming, volume 7, pages 1–72, 1997.

• G. Agha, I. Mason, S. Smith, C. Talcott, Towards a Theory of Actor Computation. Third International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 630, 1992.