History-dependent automata: an introduction

  • Authors:
  • Ugo Montanari;Marco Pistore

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Trento, Italy;University of Pisa, Italy

  • Venue:
  • SFM-Moby'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication, and Software Systems: mobile computing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In this paper we give an overview of History Dependent Automata, an extension of ordinary automata that overcomes their limitations in dealing with named calculi. In a named calculus, the observations labelling the transitions of a system may contain names which represent features such as communication channels, node identifiers, or the locations of the system. An example of named calculus is π-calculus, which has the ability of sending channel names as messages and thus of dynamically reconfiguring process acquaintances and of modeling agents and code mobility. We show that History-Dependent Automata allow for a compact representation of π-calculus processes which is suitable both for theoretical investigations and for practical purposes such as verification.