ABEL - A domain specific framework for programming with attribute-based communication

Attribute-based communication is a promising paradigm for modelling and programming complex interactions in open distributed systems such as collective adaptive systems (CAS). This new paradigm has been formalized in AbC, a kernel calculus with a minimal set of primitives that can be used to model formally verifiable CAS. The calculus assumes an underlying coordination infrastructure that has to guarantee the wanted communication and leaves open the actual implementation of the way communication partners are selected. The proposed implementations of messages exchange for AbC are either not in full agreement with the original semantics or do miss detailed performance evaluations. In this paper, we continue the search for efficient implementations of AbC and present ABEL - a domain specific framework that offers programming constructs with a direct correspondence to those of AbC. We use Erlang to implement ABEL inter- and intra-components interaction that together faithfully model AbC semantics and enable us to verify properties of ABEL program. We also consider a number of case studies and, by experimenting with them, show that it is possible to preserve AbC semantics while guaranteeing good performance. We also argue that even better performances can be achieved if the “strong” AbC requirement on the total order of message delivery is relaxed.