Abstract
Many natural and artificial systems studied across a variety of disciplines, from biology to social sciences, consist of relatively simple agents with a partial knowledge of the system as a whole, where complex collective dynamics that are difficult to anticipate emerge from local interaction. We argue how formal methods broadly understood can be of assistance in such studies with a systematic approach to specification and analysis. To convey our argument, we elaborate a proof of concept inspired from an instance of emergent behaviour commonly observed in flocks of birds.
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The tool is available at https://github.com/labs-lang/sliver.
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De Nicola, R., Di Stefano, L., Inverso, O., Valiani, S. (2022). Process Algebras and Flocks of Birds. In: Jansen, N., Stoelinga, M., van den Bos, P. (eds) A Journey from Process Algebra via Timed Automata to Model Learning . Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15629-8_27
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