A Calculus for Attribute-Based Memory Updates

In this paper, we present AbU a new ECA-inspired calculus with attribute-based communication, an interaction model recently introduced for coordinating large numbers of nodes. Attribute-based communication is similar to broadcast, but the actual receivers are selected “on the fly” by means of predicates over nodes’ attributes. After having defined syntax and formal semantics of AbU, with some examples, we give sufficient conditions on AbU systems to guarantee termination of internal steps. Then we show how to encode into AbU components written in AbC, the archetypal calculus with attribute-based communication, and we prove the correctness of such encoding.