A Distributed Semantics for a IWIM-Based Coordination Language

Coordination patterns are likely to be applied during the design phase of software development, provided the use of a suitable design-level coordination language, like COIL. This formal language is member of the IWIM family of coordination languages, but suffers up to now from a lack of distributed semantics. This paper defines a new, formal distributed semantics for COIL, taking into account problems like object migration and restrictions in non-local interactions. This new semantics opens the door to major improvements of COIL dealing with the dynamicity of coordination mechanisms, like migration of coordinated sub-systems, or dynamic re-configuration of coordinated sub-systems for instance. A discussion about the properties of this semantics is included.