Simulating Emergent Properties of Coordination in Maude: the Collective Sort Case

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Matteo Casadei, Luca Gardelli, Mirko Viroli
Carlos Canal, Mirko Viroli (eds.)
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on the Foundations of Coordination Languages and Software Architectures (FOCLASA 2006), pages 59-80
Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 175(2)
Elsevier Science B.V.
June 2007

Recent coordination languages and models are moving towards the application of techniques coming from the research context of complex systems: adaptivity and self-organization are exploited in order to tackle the openness, dynamism and unpredictability of today's distributed systems. In this area, systems are to be described using stochastic models, and simulation is a valuable tool both for analysis and design. Accordingly, in this work we focused on modelling and simulating emergent properties of coordination techniques. We first develop a framework acting as a general-purpose engine for simulating stochastic transition systems, built as a library for the Maude term rewriting system. We then evaluate this tool to a coordination problem called collective sort, where autonomous agents move tuples across different tuple spaces according to local criteria, and resulting in the emergence of the complete clustering property.

keywordsStochastic Transition System, Self-Organization, Simulation, Coordination, Collective Sort