Compositional Design, Implementation, and Verification of Swarms (Technical Report)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new formalism and techniques for the compositional design, verification, and implementation of swarm protocols, facilitating modular development and reuse of swarm components.

Contribution

It presents novel theory and methods for compositional specification, verification, and implementation of swarms, enabling correct reuse and integration of swarm protocols.

Findings

Developed a formal framework for compositional swarm specification.

Created techniques for verifying swarm components independently.

Implemented a software tool for automatic integration of swarm modules.

Abstract

Swarm protocols are a recently introduced formalism for specifying, implementing, and verifying peer-to-peer systems called swarms. A swarm consists of distributed agents called machines that communicate by asynchronous event propagation. Following a local-first model, each machine can progress without requiring continuous connectivity to other machines. Existing models of swarms are not compositional, making the modular development of large and complex swarm applications as well as the reuse of code difficult. We address these issues by presenting novel theory and techniques for the compositional specification, verification, and implementation of swarms. These results enable the correct compositional reuse of pre-existing swarm protocols and machine implementations. We implement these contributions in a companion software artifact which enables the automatic integration of independently designed and verified swarm components.