Preface for the special issue on Interaction and Concurrency Experience 2014

This special issue contains extended versions of selected papers from the 7th Interaction and Concurrency Experience workshop (ICE 2014). The workshop was held in Berlin (Germany) on June 6th, 2014. ICE workshops form a series of international scientific meetings oriented to theoretical computer science researchers with special interest in models, verification, tools, and programming primitives for complex interactions. The general scope of the venue includes theoretical and applied aspects of interactions and the synchronization mechanisms used among components of concurrent/distributed systems, related to several areas of computer science in the broad spectrum ranging from formal specification and analysis to studies inspired by emerging computational models. The authors of the most prominent papers presented at ICE 2014 were invited to submit an extended version to this special issue. In order to guarantee the fairness and quality of the selection process, each submission received at least three reviews. The review process has also ensured that the accepted articles significantly extend and improve the original workshop contributions. This special issue features three articles: • Declarative event based models of concurrency and refinement in psi-calculi, by Hakon Normann, Christian Johansen and Thomas Hildebrandt. In this paper the authors show an exploration of declarative event-based specifications open to runtime refinement aiming at a declarative model with support for adaptation. • Contracts as games on event structures, by Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli, G. Michele Pinna and Roberto Zunino. This work presents an event structure based interpretation of contracts, allowing to study the rights and obligations of contract participants in a natural setting. • Relating two automata-based models of orchestration and choreography, by Davide Basile, Pierpaolo Degano, Gian Luigi Ferrari and Emilio Tuosto. This paper presents a comparison between local contract-based specifications coordinated by orchestrators with communicating machines that have decentralized coordination. We want to thank all the authors who contributed to this volume. We would like to thank all the members of the Program Committee of ICE, who helped us in the selection of the papers and who helped the authors to improve their contributions in several ways. Additional referees were involved in the review of the papers invited for this special issue and we thank their timely contributions. We would also like to thank the editors of JLAMP, for their support during the whole editorial process.