Communicating Complex Systems

This paper outlines a new language and run-time technology offering formalised design and

effiecient implementation for highly concuurent dynamic systems. It is based on a careful combination

of ideas from Hoare’s CSP (giving compositional semantics, refinement and safety/liveness analysis) and

Milners’s pi-calculus (giving dynamic network construction and mobility). We have been experimenting

with systems developing as layered networks of self-organising neighbourhood-aware communicating

processes, with no need for advanced planning or centralised control. The work reported is part of

our TUNA (‘Theories Undepinning Nanite Assemblies’) project, in parnership with colleagues from

the Universities of York and Surry, which is investigating formal approaches to the capture of safe

emergent behaviour in highly complex systems. A particular study modelling artificial blood platelets

is described. The software technology scales to millions of processes per processor and distributes over

common multiprocssor clusters.