Reactive Systems

Welcome to the Reactive Systems Homepage

We are interested in the general notion of reactivity in computational systems that may change their behaviour and evolve as computation progresses. There is an increasing focus on the development and analysis of computational systems that exhibit `evolutionary' or `reactive' behaviour, that is, systems that alongside normal computation may invoke evolutionary changes which can modify the structure of the system itself. For various models of computation, these evolutionary changes may take very different forms.

We consider automata as labelled transition systems, where reactivity may involve relabelling the system, or changing the transition relation (i.e.~the connectivity of nodes), or, if data is stored at nodes, changing this data. Grammars for generating and recognising languages also may also be reactive in a variety of ways which we are investigating.

We also consider dynamic networks whose links and nodes are unreliable and the problem of message passing in such networks. We model the networks as concurrent systems and use standard techniques in this area.

The work here is related to the notion of system evolution and evolvable systems. We are developing a logical framework for evolvable systems.

Publications

• Reactive Grammars: An Exploration, Howard Barringer, David Rydeheard and Dov Gabbay. 2009. In this paper, we investigate various forms of reactive grammar, their expressive power and their use as language generation tools, and the relationship between reactive grammars and reactive automata.
• Modelling and Reasoning about Dynamic Networks as Concurrent Systems Yanti Rusmawati and David Rydeheard

Personnel

• Howard Barringer
• David Rydeheard
• Dov Gabbay
• Yanti Rusmawati