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Concurrency

Concurrency theory is concerned with the study of discrete behaviour, gathering events. With events we describe the behaviour of an agent being modelled giving them the responsibility for the state changing, i.e., they modify the value of the state variables as explained, e.g., in [Cost93][Cost92]). The structure of these event spaces is the object of Concurrency Theory: to describe and analyse systems consisting of agents which interact among each other by sending and receiving messages along communication channels (standard texts to introduce communication and concurrency are [Miln89][Henn88][Hoar85]). Since the systems and their component agents are the same in nature, some ideas of General System Theory can be applied as in [GG78][Gog89b][Gog89a], by means of a suitable mathematical tool, able to understand how agents can be aggregated, to build more complex agents and originate the whole hierarchy of agent's complexity. A promising tool-box is Category Theory [Adam90]. Not only Category Theory reveals the functorial nature of concurrency (as stated, e.g., in [Murp92][MM88]), but through Category Theory the wide spectrum of models for concurrency has been deeply analysed in [Niel91][Wins88][Wins87] and deconvoluted in an unification algorithm for setting up a frame model for concurrency. A recent, promising feature in Concurrency Theory is the ability to handle systems having a continuously changing configuration. This is supported by Milner's p-Calculus (see [Walk91][MPW90][Miln91][Miln90]), where the pervasive notion seized upon is naming. Agents may now communicate by sending channel names, and even their own names, around the system's boundary, allowing a high degree of mobility (explored in [Sang92]).



Pierre-Yves Schobbens
Fri Nov 25 10:58:38 WET 1994