Reachability Analysis of Mobile Ambients in Fragments of AC Term Rewriting.pdfVIP

Reachability Analysis of Mobile Ambients in Fragments of AC Term Rewriting Giorgio Delzanno and Roberto Montagna Dip. di Informatica e Scienze dell’Informazione – Universit`a di Genova Email: {giorgio,montagna}@disi.unige.it Abstract. In this paper we investigate the connection between frag- ments of Associative-Commutative Term Rewriting and fragments of Mobile Ambients, a powerful model for mobile and distributed computa- tions. The connection can be used to transfer decidability and undecid- ability results for important computational properties like reachability from one formalism to the other. Furthermore, it can be viewed as a ve- hicle to apply tools based on rewriting for the simulation and validation of high level models of mobile programs and biological systems, two main applications of Mobile Ambients. 1 Introduction Models for mobile and distributed computation like the Mobile Ambients (MA) of Cardelli and Gordon provide mechanisms for moving collections of processes across a network. The basic block of the MA model is the notion of ambient. Each ambient has a name, a collection of local agents, and a collection of sub- ambients. Local agents model the possible computations that can take place inside the ambient. Differently from standard process algebraic languages, MA agents have movement capabilities as well as primitives to dissolve the boundary of an ambient. Several variations of MA have been proposed in the literature. For instance, the Safe MA of [10] and the Boxed Ambients of [2] provide more sophisticated mechanisms for controlling the access to an ambient, whereas the BioAmbients of [14] are specifically designed to model biological systems. In this paper will restrict our attention