Specification and implementation of Actors with graph rewriting

Abstract

We are investigating the use of graph rewriting for the specification and implementation of object-based concurrent systems. Graph rewriting is a powerful framework in which to specify and implement such systems because the visual, graph-based notation more closely fits the programmer's visual image of object-based concurrent systems than textual notation, an image in which objects are represented as nodes or clusters of nodes in a graph and communication links are represented as edges in the same graph, and graph-rewriting presents an efficient implementation of object-based concurrent systems.