In a recent technical demonstration, Roland Kuhn, CTO and co-founder of Actyx, showcased significant contributions to the TaRDIS project, highlighting advances in decentralized system design and peer-to-peer communication protocols.
The demonstration featured a simplified yet practical example of a distributed system: a collection of plants requiring water, each managed by a separate computer, serviced by a fleet of autonomous robots. This peer-to-peer setup operates without central control, databases, or management systems, illustrating the power of decentralized coordination.
From Visual Design to Implementation
Kuhn emphasized the importance of visual representation in protocol design, noting that industry customers prefer state machine diagrams to visualize workflows. These diagrams effectively communicate the system’s behaviour, showing state transitions and event flows that are easily understood by domain experts who might not be comfortable reading code.
The demonstration walked through the complete development process, from visual protocol design to implementation:
- Creating a visual state machine diagram;
- Transcribing the diagram into a JSON data structure;
- Implementing local workflows using the Active Machine Runner TypeScript library;
- Verifying the implementation against the original protocol design.
Advanced Verification Tools
A key feature highlighted in the presentation was TaRDIS’s verification toolset, which ensures that implemented state machines faithfully reflect the intended protocol design. These tools verify two critical aspects:
- Protocol well-formedness, ensuring all participants receive necessary events;
- Achievement of eventual consensus across the swarm.
The system automatically detects and reports discrepancies between the implementation and the protocol specification, helping developers catch potential issues early in the development process.
New Features and Ongoing Development
The presentation revealed several important developments in the TaRDIS project:
- Implementation of ephemeral event streams and allowing for bounded storage requirements in long-running systems;
- Development of a graphical swarm protocol editor to improve accessibility for domain experts;
- Ongoing improvements to protocol verification capabilities by making them more precise and expressive.
Real-World Applications
The technology’s practical application was demonstrated through a live example where multiple plants and robots coordinated water delivery without central control. This illustration showed how the system maintains synchronization across multiple nodes, with each participant operating independently while maintaining consistent state across the network.
Looking Forward
These advancements mark significant progress in simplifying the development of swarm systems while improving their reliability. The TaRDIS project continues to evolve, with a particular focus on enhancing tools for swarm development and strengthening verification capabilities.
The integration of Actyx’s existing capabilities with new TaRDIS features promises to deliver more robust and scalable solutions for decentralized system design, particularly valuable in industrial logistics and autonomous system coordination.
Watch demo on our YouTube channel or here below: