In
computer science, the
ambient calculus is a
process calculus devised by
Luca Cardelli and
Andrew D. Gordon in 1998, and used to describe and theorise about
concurrent systems that include
mobility. Here
mobility means both computation carried out on mobile devices (
i.e. networks that have a dynamic topology), and mobile computation (
i.e. executable code that is able to move around the network). The ambient calculus provides a unified framework for modeling both kinds of mobility. It is used to model interactions in such
concurrent systems as the
Internet.