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. For example, for automata consisting of labelled transition systems, 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.

One aspect of this is a logical framework for evolvable systems which is under development.

Publications and Draft Papers

• 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. [Submitted for publication.]

Personnel

• Howard Barringer
• David Rydeheard
• Dov Gabbay