Mobile Agents in Interaction Spaces

Mobile agent systems are difficult to reason about and implement efficiently and safely. Theoretical work, most notably process calculi, provide solid semantics for mobile systems. However, the theory is often too abstract to match with the requirements of practical implementations. To fill this gap, intermediate models must be proposed. We present in this paper such a model named Interaction Spaces, a metaphor of geometrical spaces in which agents interact through simple transformations. The framework captures high-level distributed semantics, most notably asynchronous, multicast communications on FIFO channels. It also refines and implements the channel passing feature of the pi-calculus, together with the mobility of agent themselves. Above interaction spaces, we propose a full-fledged agent calculus and its associated operational semantics.