Selected Papers of the 21st International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION 2019)

---

1. Representing Dependencies in Event Structures

G. Michele Pinna.

Event structures where the causality may explicitly change during a computation have recently gained the stage. In this kind of event structures the changes in the set of the causes of an event are triggered by modifiers that may add or remove dependencies, thus making the happening of an event contextual. Still the focus is always on the dependencies of the event. In this paper we promote the idea that the context determined by the modifiers plays a major role, and the context itself determines not only the causes but also what causality should be. Modifiers are then used to understand when an event (or a set of events) can be added to a configuration, together with a set of events modeling dependencies, which will play a less important role. We show that most of the notions of Event Structure presented in literature can be translated into this new kind of event structure, preserving the main notion, namely the one of configuration.

---

2. Synthesis of Orchestrations and Choreographies: Bridging the Gap between Supervisory Control and Coordination of Services

Davide Basile ; Maurice H. ter Beek ; Rosario Pugliese.

We present a number of contributions to bridging the gap between supervisory control theory and coordination of services in order to explore the frontiers between coordination and control systems. Firstly, we modify the classical synthesis algorithm from supervisory control theory for obtaining the so-called most permissive controller in order to synthesise orchestrations and choreographies of service contracts formalised as contract automata. The key ingredient to make this possible is a novel notion of controllability. Then, we present an abstract parametric synthesis algorithm and show that it generalises the classical synthesis as well as the orchestration and choreography syntheses. Finally, through the novel abstract synthesis, we show that the concrete syntheses are in a refinement order. A running example from the service domain illustrates our contributions.

---

3. Field-based Coordination with the Share Operator

Giorgio Audrito ; Jacob Beal ; Ferruccio Damiani ; Danilo Pianini ; Mirko Viroli.

Field-based coordination has been proposed as a model for coordinating collective adaptive systems, promoting a view of distributed computations as functions manipulating data structures spread over space and evolving over time, called computational fields. The field calculus is a formal foundation for field computations, providing specific constructs for evolution (time) and neighbor interaction (space), which are handled by separate operators (called rep and nbr, respectively). This approach, however, intrinsically limits the speed of information propagation that can be achieved by their combined use. In this paper, we propose a new field-based coordination operator called share, which captures the space-time nature of field computations in a single operator that declaratively achieves: (i) observation of neighbors' values; (ii) reduction to a single local value; and (iii) update and converse sharing to neighbors of a local variable. We show that for an important class of self-stabilising computations, share can replace all occurrences of rep and nbr constructs. In addition to conceptual economy, use of the share operator also allows many prior field calculus algorithms to be greatly accelerated, which we validate empirically with simulations of frequently used network propagation and collection algorithms.

---

4. Reversing Place Transition Nets

Hernán Melgratti ; Claudio Antares Mezzina ; Irek Ulidowski.

Petri nets are a well-known model of concurrency and provide an ideal setting for the study of fundamental aspects in concurrent systems. Despite their simplicity, they still lack a satisfactory causally reversible semantics. We develop such semantics for Place/Transitions Petri nets (P/T nets) based on two observations. Firstly, a net that explicitly expresses causality and conflict among events, for example an occurrence net, can be straightforwardly reversed by adding a reverse transition for each of its forward transitions. Secondly, given a P/T net the standard unfolding construction associates with it an occurrence net that preserves all of its computation. Consequently, the reversible semantics of a P/T net can be obtained as the reversible semantics of its unfolding. We show that such reversible behaviour can be expressed as a finite net whose tokens are coloured by causal histories. Colours in our encoding resemble the causal memories that are typical in reversible process calculi.

---

5. Towards Races in Linear Logic

Wen Kokke ; J. Garrett Morris ; Philip Wadler.

Process calculi based in logic, such as $\pi$DILL and CP, provide a foundation for deadlock-free concurrent programming, but exclude non-determinism and races. HCP is a reformulation of CP which addresses a fundamental shortcoming: the fundamental operator for parallel composition from the $\pi$-calculus does not correspond to any rule of linear logic, and therefore not to any term construct in CP. We introduce non-deterministic HCP, which extends HCP with a novel account of non-determinism. Our approach draws on bounded linear logic to provide a strongly-typed account of standard process calculus expressions of non-determinism. We show that our extension is expressive enough to capture many uses of non-determinism in untyped calculi, such as non-deterministic choice, while preserving HCP's meta-theoretic properties, including deadlock freedom.

---