Distributed spaces in concurrent constraint programming (d-spaces).

Title: D-Spaces. abstract: Given their complexity and increasing popularity, the design, analysis, simulation, and programming of the new era of distributed systems will continue to raise important challenges to computer science. We propose to rise to this challenge by developing an innovative and expressive computational model for these systems that will coherently combine techniques for the analysis of concurrent systems such as process calculi with epistemic and spatial formalisms. The model should provide reasoning techniques to predict potential privacy breaches as well as intrusive and unreliable behaviour. Epistemic analysis will be used to reason about the distributed agents information, beliefs and knowledge acquired during computation. Spatial formalisms will be used to describe distributed network topologies. The integration of these formalisms in a single framework will allow us to capture meaningful families of modern distributed systems that cannot be faithfully modeled in any previous concurrent framework.