Lambda the Ultimate

Recovering resources in the pi-calculus

Although limits of resources such as memory or disk usage
are one of the key problems of many communicating applications, most
process algebras fail to take this aspect of mobile and concurrent systems
into account. In order to study this problem, we introduce the Controlled
pi-calculus, an extension of the pi-calculus with a notion of recovery of
unused resources with an explicit (parametrized) garbage-collection and
dead-process elimination. We discuss the definition of garbage-collection
and dead-process elimination for concurrent, communicating applications,
and provide a type-based technique for statically proving resource
bounds. Selected examples are presented and show the potential of the
Controlled pi-calculus.