Mapping REO on TuCSoN/ReSpecT

research project

Authors

Abstract

Nowadays modern systems are becoming very modular and made of independent components, which can be implemented using different languages (e.g. Java and C-like languages).

Since these components are different from each other and considering that every component interface depends on its context, it can occur that a gap is produced among these interfaces in a distributed system. For this purpose, the focus has been moved from system design to system coordination and interaction. As a consequence, new formalisms, a.k.a. coordination models, have been developed. A coordination model is a conceptual framework for modelling the space of interaction among components in multi-component system.

One of the models for the coordination of a agent-based distributed system is the tuple-based one. A particular implementation of this paradigm is the tuple center. As reported in RespectScp41, a tuple center is a tuple space whose behaviour can be defined by means of reactions to communication events. More precisely, a tuple centre is a communication abstraction which is perceived by the interacting entities as a standard tuple space, but whose behaviour, in response to communication events, can be defined so as to embed the laws of coordination. Besides TuCSoN/ReSpecT, REO is another exogenous coordination model based on channel calculus. REO can be used as a flexible glue code to implement connectors that handle system components. In addition, it defines the primitives which allow to compose channels: the communication medium that provides a temporal/spatial decoupling between two components.

In this work we propose a means to encode REO components into ReSpecT tuple centres.