A Calculus of Countable Broadcasting Systems [chapter]

Yoshinao Isobe, Yutaka Sato, Kazuhito Ohmaki
1995 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
In this paper we propose a process algebra named CCB (a Calculus of Countable Broadcasting Systems). We define an observational congruence relation in CCB after basic definitions of CCB, and give a sound and complete axiom system for the congruence relation of finite agents. CCB is developed for analyzing a multi-agent model with broadcast communication. The most important property of CCB is that a broadcaster of a message can know the number of receivers of the message after broadcasting. The
more » ... roperty is not easily described in the other process algebras. The multi-agent model is useful for constructing extensible systems. A disadvantage of the multi-agent model is that agents must be designed very carefully because unexpected behavior may arise by interactions between the agents. Therefore we want to analyze behavior of the agents. Introduction A design of software should be divided into several program components called agents which may be executed concurrently and communicate with each other through events, in order to develop and refine them independently thus efficiently. This approach is called a multi-agent model [1] . The advantages of the multi-agent model can be summarized as follows: 1. Choice of different description languages: Each agent can be programmed by its appropriate language and communicate with other agents through some standardized protocols modeled as events. 2. Software reusability: If each agent is carefully designed, it can be shared and reused. The interfaces (i.e., protocols) between agents must be designed simple and flexible to achieve this goal. 3. Machine independence: Machine independence should be realized in recent computer systems which contain a wide variety of machines in one network. The multi-agent model will also fit to realize this machine independence. In order to flexibly connect agents, one of the authors has developed a mechanism named VIABUS[13] which has a software bus architecture with broadcast communication based on the multi-agent model. The advantage of broadcast communication is that a broadcaster of an event need not be modified when new receivers of the event are attached to VIABUS, because destinations of the event
doi:10.1007/3-540-60043-4_73 fatcat:cbcssu6rd5di7atfz7cmore6de