Communicating by compatibility

A bio-inspired language is presented. Its terms are processes enclosed into boxes with typed interaction sites. The main feature of the formalism lays in the fact that the key-lock communication mechanism typically adopted by process calculi is partially relaxed in favour of a paradigm driven by a (parametric) notion of compatibility of interaction types. Two simple modelling examples are reported: one inspired by the immune system, and the other by web services. These examples show that embedding compatibility into the communication paradigm may be helpful for the specification of both biological and information technology scenarios. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.