Tuple-based Coordination of Stochastic Systems with Uniform Primitives: Formal Semantics & Expressive Power

In order to provide the expressiveness required for the coordination of complex computational systems – such as nature-inspired, self-organising ones –, tuple-based coordination models need to be enriched with suitable probabilistic mechanisms. To this end, we explicitly introduce uniform primitives as a probabilistic specialisation of standard Linda coordination primitives, replacing don’t know non-determinism with uniform distribution. In this paper, we define their semantics – first informally, then formally –, discuss their expressiveness and impact on system predictability, describe their implementation and finally compare them with other probabilistic approaches to tuple-based coordination.