A bigraphical reactive system (BRS) involves bigraphs, in which the nesting of nodes represents locality, independently of the edges connecting them; it also allows bigraphs to reconfigure themselves. BRSs aim to provide a uniform way to model spatially distributed systems that both compute and communicate. In this memorandum we develop their static and dynamic theory. In part I, we illustrate...

A bigraphical reactive system (BRS) involves bigraphs, in which the nesting of nodes represents locality, independently of the edges connecting them; it also allows bigraphs to reconfigure themselves. BRSs aim to provide a uniform way to model spatially distributed systems that both compute and communicate. In this memorandum we develop their static and dynamic theory. In Part I we illustrate...

A framework is defined within which reactive systems can be studied formally. The framework is based upon s-categories, a new variety of categories, within which reactive systems can be set up in such a way that labelled transition systems can be uniformly extracted. These lead in turn to behavioural preorders and equivalences, such as the failures preorder (treated elsewhere) and bisimilarity, which are guaranteed to be congruential. The theory rests upon the notion of relative pushout previously introduced by the authors. The framework

Recent work has shown that presheaf categories provide a general model of concurrency, with an inbuilt notion of bisimulation based on open maps. Here it is shown how this approach can also handle systems where the language of actions may change dynamically as a process evolves. The example is the pi-calculus, a calculus for `mobile processes' whose communication topology varies as channels are created and discarded. A denotational semantics is described for the pi-calculus within an indexed category of profunctors; the model is fully abstract for bisimilarity, in the sense that bisimulation in the model, obtained from open maps, coincides with the usual bisimulation obtained from the operational semantics of the pi-calculus. While attention is concentrated on the `late' semantics of the pi-calculus, it is indicated how the `early' and other variants can also be captured.

This paper introduces a process calculus designed to capture the phenomenon of names which are known universally but always refer to local information. Our system extends the pi-calculus so that a channel name can have within its scope several disjoint local areas. Such a channel name may be used for communication within an area, it may be sent between areas, but it cannot itself be used to transmit information from one area to another. Areas are arranged in a hierarchy of levels, distinguishing for example between a single application, a machine, or a whole network. We give an operational semantics for the calculus, and develop a type system that guarantees the proper use of channels within their local areas. We illustrate with models of an internet service protocol and a pair of distributed agents.

We show how the #-calculus can express local communications within a distributed system, through an encoding of the local area #-calculus, an enriched system that explicitly represents names which are known universally but always refer to local information. Our translation replaces point-to-point communication with a system of shared local ethers; we prove that this preserves and reflects process behaviour.

This paper presents a type system to control the migration of code between sites in a concurrent distributed framework. The type system constitutes a decidable mechanism to ensure specific security policies, which control remote communication, process migration, and channel creation. The approach is as follows: each network administrator specifies sites privileges, and a type system checks that the processes running at those sites, as well as the composition of the sites, respect these policies. At runtime, well-typed networks do not violate the security policies declared for each site.

We extend the #-calculus with polyadic synchronisation, a generalisation of the communication mechanism which allows channel names to be composite. We show that this operator embeds nicely in the theory of #-calculus, and makes it possible to derive divergence-free encodings of distributed calculi. We give a separation result between the #-calculus with polyadic synchronisation ( #) and the original calculus, in the style of an analogous result given by Palamidessi for mixed choice. We encode Local Area # showing how to control the local use of resources in #.