Time Refinement in a Functional Synchronous Language

International audienceConcurrent and reactive systems often exhibit multiple time scales. For instance, in a discrete simulation, the scale at which agents communicate might be very different from the scale used to model the internals of each agent. We propose an extension of the synchronous model of concurrency, called reactive domains, to simplify the programming of such systems. Reactive domains allow the creation of local time scales and enable refinement, that is, the replacement of an approximation of a system with a more detailed version without changing its behavior as observed by the rest of the program. Our work is applied to the ReactiveML language, which extends ML with synchronous language constructs. We present an operational semantics for the extended language and a type system that ensures the soundness of programs