A Calculus of Branching Processes

CCS-like calculi can be viewed as an extension of classical automata with communication primitives. We are interested here to follow this principle, applied to tree-automata. It naturally yields a calculus of branching processes (CBP), where the continuations of communications are allowed to branch according to the arity of the communication channel. After introducing the calculus with a reduction semantics we show that CBP can be “implemented” by a fully compositional LTS semantics. We argue that CBP offers an interesting tradeoff between calculi with a fixed communication topology à la CCS and calculi with dynamic connectivity such as the π-calculus.