Synchronous Coordination of Distributed Components

Abstract

Coordination is a relatively recent field, considerably inspired by concurrency theory [83, 85, 91]. Coordination languages and models [90] are based on the philosophy that an application or a system should be divided into the parts that perform computations, typically components or services, and the parts that coordinate the results and resources required to perform the computations. The coordination aspect focuses on the latter, describing how the components or services are connected. In this thesis we study a specific class of coordination models, namely synchronous, exogenous, and composable models, and we exploit implementation techniques for such models in distributed environments. Our work concentrates on the Reo coordination model [8] as the main representative of this class of coordination models.