On the Expressiveness of Event-based Coordination Media
Mirko Viroli, Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci · 2002
Abstract—In the context of component-based systems, co-ordination can be thought of as an event-based service pro-vided by a coordination medium. However, this interpre-tation is not endorsed by some researches in the field of coordination and in particular by existing attempts to de-fine a notion of expressiveness for coordination models. So, in this paper we elaborate on providing a new charac-terisation of expressiveness for coordination models, which takes into account the ability of a coordination medium to support (possibly complex) event-based coordination mech-anisms, capturing and generalising features of both data-driven and control-driven coordination models. Based on this characterisation, a formalism for denoting coordination media is developed and is proved to be fully expressive. Ex-amples are provided that show its ability to represent some of the main features and mechanisms of well-known models, such as Linda primitives, event notification, and expiring data. Index Terms—Expressiveness of coordination models, tuple-based coordination, event notification, formal models, interactive computing I.