A calculus for collective-adaptive systems and its behavioural theory

We propose a process calculus, named AbC, to study the behavioural theory of interactions in collective-adaptive systems by relying on attribute-based communication. An AbC system consists of a set of parallel components each of which is equipped with a set of attributes. Communication takes place in an implicit multicast fashion, and interaction among components is dynamically established by taking into account “connections” as determined by predicates over their attributes. The structural operational semantics of AbC is based on Labelled Transition Systems that are also used to define bisimilarity between components. Labelled bisimilarity is in full agreement with a barbed congruence, defined by relying on simple basic observables and context closure. The introduced equivalence is used to study the expressiveness of AbC in terms of encoding aspects of broadcast channel-based interactions and to establish formal relationships between system descriptions at different levels of abstraction.