K.M. Chandy, B.E. Aydemir, E.M. Karpilovsky, and D.M. Zimmerman (USA)
distributed software systems and applications, informationsystems, distributed agents, crisis management
This paper describes an approach for developing distributed applications that help deal with rapidly changing situations such as terrorist attacks, hurricanes and supply chain dis ruptions. Important characteristics of such applications are that they must handle unexpected events and that they are often modified on-the-fly, by multiple people who may be long to different organizations, to deal with changing situ ations. Abstract and concrete models for specifying, reason ing about, and implementing such systems are presented. In the abstract model, an application is a set of state tran sition rules over the global state of a distributed system. In the concrete model, an application is a set of message driven processes and each computation is a sequence of atomic operations in which a process receives a message, changes its state, and sends messages. An implementa tion of the concrete model using XML as the message and state format, with state transitions specified using XSLT, is briefly described. A key feature of this implementation is that messages and process states are represented using a format that allows applications to be easily observed and modified during their execution.
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