Beyond Mobility - What Next After CSP/pi?

Michael Goldsmith ( WMG Digital Laboratory, University of Warwick )

Process algebras like CSP and CCS inspired the original occam model of communication and process encapsulation. Later the pi-calculus and various treatments handling mobility in CSP added support for mobility, as realised in practical programming systems such as occam-pi, JCSP, CHP and Sufrin's CSO, which allow a rather abstract notion of motion of processes and channel ends between parents or owners. Milner's Space and Motion of Communicating Agents on the other hand describes the bigraph framework, which makes location more of a first-class citizen of the calculus and evolves through reaction rules which rewrite both place and link graphs of matching sections of a system state, allowing more dramatic dynamic reconfigurations of a system than simple process spawning or migration. I consider the tractability of the notation, and to what extent the additional flexibility reflects or elicits desirable programming paradigms.