Semantics for an actor-based real-time language

We give formal semantics for a distributed concurrent object oriented real time programming language based on a variant of the actor model which includes an extention enabling the specification of time constraints on message invocation. Real time semantics must capture both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the language, and provide a meaning for the real time constructs. The real time semantics of our language is given as timed graph, an existing real time specification formalism. We present the semantics by first defining an operational semantics for the untimed language, and then translating this into a timed graph which interprets the time constructs. Our semantics is formulated independently of the underlying resources needed to execute a program; the semantics of a program thus defines the set of permissible concrete implementations.