RE: Pi4 - Applicability of pi-calculus to BCM "linking and switching" and V3.0 ebBP?

Forgot the link to the article!

 

 http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=370&page=1

 

DW

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Pi4
- Applicability of pi-calculus to BCM "linking and
switching" and
V3.0 ebBP?
From: "David RR Webber (XML)"
<>
Date: Tue, March 14, 2006 9:59 am
To:

Cc: ,


Folks - this interview is actually quite useful.

 

I'm currently developing webservice software that is highly
event/action driven and seeing several of the same issues regarding
process timings, resource and coordination.  Since its only a
small local system - its solvable by traditional control logic.

 

<snip>

SR-T - If you have a livelock, a race condition,
or a deadlock, it will show up as either a warning or an error in your
system description, and it will point you to the specific lines in your
choreography where that's occurring. You won't have to be aware how it
does that. What you'll get is, 'Hey, you might have a problem
here."

 

SS So in much the same way that the compiler would
have flagged a low-level error in days gone by, this will flag an error
in the interactions modeling.

 

SR-T Correct.

</snip>

 

The take-away here though that I'm seeing is that the Pi4
foundation is available as open source :

 

<snip>

"That's how we can manage to engage with the widest community in
terms of furthering the groundbreaking work. Just to give you an
example, we've got Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida, and Robin Milner all
working on the open source stuff for the advanced type system. We've
also had two other research groups approach Pi4 Tech to contribute. One
is the University of Bologna, which is well known in the pi-calculus
community, and the other is Imperial College, which is Howard Foster's
group that has been using something called the labeled transition
system analyzer. 

 

By open sourcing in this way, we've managed to remove all of the IP
(intellectual property) issues that worry academics, and as a result, we
have academia working on business-focused problems, which is very rare.
I know that Professor Robin Milner is very excited by the way we've
managed to pull people together and to give relevance to all the body
of work that he has founded, and it's that relevance that's key".

</snip>

 

Being able to detect these issues at the compiler / runtime level -
is something I'm used to using in Prolog - where it will explicitly warn
you that something is non-deterministic.  

 

We already have the means in BPSS to leverage Prolog-style
deterministic logic checks ( Yes - you implicitly want business
agreements to be deterministic and therefore legal!!!).

 

But - introducing the BCM notion of linking-and-switching - and a
control agent for that - does mean that now its not possible for the
local logic check to know if race conditions and other conflicts
existing at the level of the whole network.

 

I know this is something that is not immediate for us - since BCM
and BPSS are right now moving thru the "let's get this version out
there and finished" mode - but once we circle back around in a month or
so - to moving to "what's next" - this definately looks of potential
applicability...

 

DW