Process Calculi

Process calculi facilitate formal descriptions of concurrent systems. They are constructed in a way to model interaction, communication, and synchronisation between groups of independent processes (also called agents). Objects from which process calculi are composed of are derived directly from the processes. Assigned properties complete a process denotation. Dependency structures between processes form a network topology with dynamical behaviour. Following certain transformation rules, the network of processes can be analysed. An example for a general purpose process calculus is CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes, [6]). Instances of Petri nets ([13]), ß calculus ([10]), and the ambient calculus ([1]) exemplify representations of CSNs.