An algebraic graph grammar model for actor systems

Abstract

The actor model is a concurrent and object-based computation paradigm. It has particularly been developed in order to describe massive parallelism within a dynamic topology of concurrently acting computational agents, called actors. Communication between actors is restricted to asynchronous message passing. In this paper actor systems are modelled by a certain kind of algebraic graph grammars, called algebraic actor graph grammars. Algebraic actor graph grammars follow the single pushout approach of graph transformation. Suitable, algebraically specified attributes allow the inclusion of predefined actors on an appropriate level of abstraction leading to a formal and comprehensible approach to the description of corresponding systems. The main theoretical result of this paper is that each algebraic graph grammar derivation satisfies all the mathematical properties which, according to W.D. Clinger, are required for an actor system. This does not only prove that the current modelling is faithful but, moreover, reveals those parts of the concrete actor model which are essential w.r.t. the actor paradigm. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: RN 2856(1993,21) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman