Contracts in distributed systems

Massimo Bartoletti
(Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Universita' degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy)
Emilio Tuosto
(Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, UK)
Roberto Zunino
(DISI-Universita' degli Studi di Trento and COSBI, Italy)

We present a parametric calculus for contract-based computing in distributed systems. By abstracting from the actual contract language, our calculus generalises both the contracts-as-processes and contracts-as-formulae paradigms. The calculus features primitives for advertising contracts, for reaching agreements, and for querying the fulfilment of contracts. Coordination among principals happens via multi-party sessions, which are created once agreements are reached. We present two instances of our calculus, by modelling contracts as (i) processes in a variant of CCS, and (ii) as formulae in a logic. With the help of a few examples, we discuss the primitives of our calculus, as well as some possible variants.

In Alexandra Silva, Simon Bliudze, Roberto Bruni and Marco Carbone: Proceedings Fourth Interaction and Concurrency Experience (ICE 2011), Reykjavik, Iceland, 9th June 2011, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 59, pp. 130–147.
Published: 31st July 2011.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.59.11 bibtex PDF
References in reconstructed bibtex, XML and HTML format (approximated).
Comments and questions to: eptcs@eptcs.org
For website issues: webmaster@eptcs.org