In: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1091; Proc. 17th International Conference in Application and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN'96), Osaka, Japan, pages 1-10. Springer-Verlag, June 1996.
Abstract: This paper reviews the state of the art in building and reasoning about concurrent system using actors. We first provide a brief definition of actors and discuss the status of actor theory. We then describe a number of programming abstractions that are useful in developing and maintaining complex concurrent systems. Defining such abstractions requires a sort of system decomposition that is not supported by standard models of concurrency, including actors and nets. Rather a suitable meta-architecture is needed and its satisfactory formal definition remains elusive. We currently have only rudimentary semantics for the different programming abstractions that we have developed.