A calculus for attribute-based communication

A distributed API for coordinating AbC programs

Collective adaptive systems exhibit a particular notion of interaction where environmental conditions largely influence interactions. Previously, we proposed a calculus, namedAbC, to model and reason about CAS. The calculus proved to be effective by naturally modelling essential CAS features. However, the question on the tradeoff between its expressiveness and its efficiency, when implemented to program CAS applications, is to be answered. In this article, we propose an efficient and distributed coordination infrastructure forAbC. We prove its correctness, and we evaluate its performance. The main novelty of our approach is thatAbCcomponents are infrastructure agnostic. Thus the code of a component does not specify how messages are routed in the infrastructure but rather what properties a target component must satisfy. We also developed a Go API, named$$\mathcal {G}{} \textit{o}\mathcal {A}{} \textit{t}$$GoAt, and an Eclipse plugin to program in a high-level syntax which can be automatically used to generate matching Go code. We showcase our development through a non-trivial case study.