Partially distributed coordination with Reo and constraint automata. Issue 3 (September 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jongmans, Sung-Shik; Santini, Francesco; Arbab, Farhad
• Is Part Of: Service oriented computing and applications. Volume 9:Issue 3(2016:Sep.)
• Page Start: 311
• Page End: 339
• Publication Date: 2015-09
• Subjects: Reo coordination language -- Distributed computation -- Web service composition -- Orchestration; Electronic data processing -- Distributed processing -- Periodicals; Web services -- Periodicals; Electronic commerce -- Periodicals; 004
• DOI: 10.1007/s11761-015-0177-y
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1863-2386

Abstract

Abstract Coordination languages, such as Reo, have emerged for the specification and implementation of interaction protocols among concurrent entities, manifested as connectors. In this paper, we describe a theoretical justification and a practical proof-of-concept tool for automatically generating partially distributed, partially centralized implementations of Reo connectors. Such implementations have three performance advantages: faster compilation at build time (compared to a purely centralized approach), reduced latency at run time (compared to a purely distributed approach), and improved parallelism at run time (compared to a purely centralized approach). Our theory relies on the definition of a new product operator on constraint automata (Reo's formal semantics), which we use to formally justify distributions of disjoint parts of a coordination scheme over different machines according to several possible motivations (e.g., performance, QoS constraints, privacy, resource availability, and network topology). To exemplify our work, in a case study, we show and explain how a generated connector implementation can be executed.