Compositional and Executable Representations of Nano Devices

The aim of the project is to develop, starting from the theory of process calculi, a complete suite of theoretical and practical tools (called “framework” in the following) supporting the modeling, analysis and validation of properties of nano devices. Recently, process calculi have been successfully adapted to model biological systems. Artificial nano devices are much simpler than biological systems; nevertheless, their detailed description requires further significant improvements of the expressive power of process calculi, also because of the influence of the hosting environments. For instance, the behavior of a supramolecular system may depend not only on the proximity of potentially interacting components, but also on the overall concentration of specific elements in the environment. Moreover, the behavior of nano devices is usually known on a statistical basis: for a given concentration of devices in a medium, a certain fraction of them will show some specific behavior.