A Process Calculus for Spatially-explicit Ecological Models

Abstract

We propose PALPS, a Process Algebra with Locations for Population Systems. PALPS allows us to produce spatially-explicit, individual-based models and to reason about their behavior. Our calculus has two levels: at the first level we may define the behavior of an individual of a population while, at the second level, we may specify a system as the collection of individuals of various species located in space, moving through their life cycle while changing their location, if they so wish, and interacting with each other in various ways such as preying on each other. Furthermore, we propose a probabilistic temporal logic for reasoning about the behavior of PALPS processes. We illustrate our framework via models of dispersal in metapopulations

MELA: Modelling in Ecology with Location Attributes

“…First of all, process algebras are simple high-level languages, that give the possibility to easily model and to better understand the interactions between agents and whole system properties, for example, consistency check via static analysis. Another important aspect of process algebras is their compositional nature: the individual-based approach of modelling populations enables the modeller to describe the evolution of each individual in the population as a process and, subsequently, to compose a set of individuals into a complete ecological system [1]. Therefore, MELA allows users to describe single or multiple species (i.e.…”

Investigating Fluid-Flow Semantics of Asynchronous Tuple-Based Process Languages for Collective Adaptive Systems

“…In this respect, our proposal is more similar to sCCP [3], although, from a technical point of view, for the actual definition of the differential semantics we followed the approach used in [23,13] rather than that presented in [3]. Finally, our work is also related to PALPS [1] and MASSPA [15]. PALPS is a language for ecological models.…”