Matthew Hennessy – författare

Distributed systems are fast becoming the norm in computer science. Formal mathematical models and theories of distributed behaviour are needed in order to understand them. This book proposes a distributed pi-calculus called Dpi, for describing the behaviour of mobile agents in a distributed world. It is based on an existing formal language, the pi-calculus, to which it adds a network layer and a primitive migration construct. A mathematical theory of the behaviour of these distributed systems is developed, in which the presence of types plays a major role. It is also shown how in principle this theory can be used to develop verification techniques for guaranteeing the behavior of distributed agents. The text is accessible to computer scientists with a minimal background in discrete mathematics. It contains an elementary account of the pi-calculus, and the associated theory of bisimulations. It also develops the type theory required by Dpi from first principles.

This volume contains the contributions of the 29th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) held July8-13, 2002 in M'alaga, Spain. The diversityand the qualityof the scienti?c program of ICALP 2002 serve as evidence that theoretical computer science with all its aspects continues to be a vibrant ?eld and is increasinglyturning into a valuable and abundant source of ideas and concepts for other research disciplines and app- cations. ICALP has been the main annual scienti?c event of the European Assoc- tion for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) for almost thirtyyears, making ICALP one of the best-established conferences in theoretical computer science and EATCS one of the world's largest and oldest theoretical computer science organizations. To re?ect the two parts of the EATCS journal Theoretical Computer Science (TCS), ICALP's technical program is split into two parts: while track A is - voted to algorithms, automata, complexity, and games, track B focuses on logic, semantics, and theoryof programming.