Modeling Concurrent Systems: Actors, Nets, and the Problem of Abstraction and Composition

This paper reviews the state of the art in building and reasoning about concurrent system using actors. We first provide a brief definition of actors and discuss the status of actor theory. We then describe a number of programming abstractions that are useful in developing and maintaining complex concurrent systems. Defining such abstractions requires a sort of system decomposition that is not supported by standard models of concurrency, including actors and nets. Rather a suitable meta-architecture is needed and its satisfactory formal definition remains elusive. We currently have only rudimentary semantics for the different programming abstractions that we have developed.

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