Compositional Design, Implementation, and Verification of Swarms (Technical Report)

2026-04-17

AI Summary

Existing swarm protocols lack compositionality, hindering modular development and code reuse in large-scale, complex systems. This work proposes a compositional approach grounded in a local-first, asynchronous communication model, establishing the first theoretical framework for compositional swarm protocols that enables independent component design, formal specification, and correct integration. By integrating formal methods, asynchronous event propagation, and local-first computation paradigms, the authors develop a verifiable protocol composition technique accompanied by an automated toolchain. This ensures that verified components retain global system correctness upon integration, substantially enhancing both development efficiency and system reliability.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Humans and AI: Crowd Sourcing and Human Computation
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Swarm protocols are a recently introduced formalism for specifying, implementing, and verifying peer-to-peer systems called swarms. A swarm consists of distributed agents called machines that communicate by asynchronous event propagation. Following a local-first model, each machine can progress without requiring continuous connectivity to other machines. Existing models of swarms are not compositional, making the modular development of large and complex swarm applications as well as the reuse of code difficult. We address these issues by presenting novel theory and techniques for the compositional specification, verification, and implementation of swarms. These results enable the correct compositional reuse of pre-existing swarm protocols and machine implementations. We implement these contributions in a companion software artifact which enables the automatic integration of independently designed and verified swarm components.

Problem

• swarm protocols
• compositional design
• modular development
• code reuse
• peer-to-peer systems

Innovation

• compositional design
• swarm protocols
• asynchronous event propagation
• modular verification
• local-first systems