A Systematic Approach to Programming and Verifying Attribute-Based Communication Systems

A methodology is presented for the systematic development of systems of many components, that interact by relying on predicates over attributes that they themselves mutually expose. The starting point is a novel process calculus AbC (for Attribute-based Communication) introduced for modelling collective-adaptive systems. It is shown how to refine the model by introducing a translator from AbC into UML-like state machines that can be analyzed by UMC. In order to execute the specification, another translator is introduced that maps AbC terms into ABEL, a domain-specific framework that offers faithful AbC-style programming constructs built on top of Erlang. It is also shown how the proposed methodology can be used to assess relevant properties of systems and to automatically obtain an executable program for a non-trivial case study.