A Calculus for Reconfigurable Component-Based Systems

The concept of reconfigurable systems is almost always restricted to the abstract design level, in which configuration languages are used to manipulate software connections. In this paper, we propose to deal with reconfiguration abstraction also in the formal specification level. We show that the process algebra π-calculus, widely applied to specify composable systems, is not suitable to capture all the properties required by these kinds of systems. To deal with these restrictions of π, we propose the Rπ-calculus. Rπ is a π-calculus extension that uses the concept of components as unit of specification. Its semantics allows for the reconfiguration of formal specifications in the same way configuration languages do.