Reactive Actors: Isolation for Efficient Analysis of Distributed Systems

In this paper we explain how the isolation or decoupling of actors can help in developing efficient analysis techniques. The Reactive Object Language, Rebeca, and its timed extension are introduced as actor-based languages for modeling and analyzing distributed systems. We show how floating-time transition system can be used for model checking of timed actor models when we are interested in event-based properties, and how it helps in state space reduction. We explain how the model of computation of actors helps in devising an efficient state distribution policy in distributed model checking. We show how we use Rebeca to verify the routing algorithms of mobile adhoc networks. The paper is written in a way to make the ideas behind each technique clear such that it can be reused in similar domains.