Actor-Oriented Programming

(1) Loosely, actors are concurrent components that communicate through ports and interact according to a common patterns of interaction.

(2) Primarily, actor-oriented design allows designers to consider the interaction between components distinctly from the specification of component behavior. ... Where others usually the communication mechanism becomes an integral part of a component design.

(3) AO platforms orthogonalize the actor definition language and the actor composition language, enabling highly polymorphic actor definitions and design using multiple models of computation.

(4) Perhaps the most significant advantage of AO design is the use of patterns of component interaction with useful modeling properties. These patterns are termed models of computation.

(5) Simulink is one of the most successful instances of model-based design. Simulink also represents an instance of what is called AO design.

(6) A platform is an abstraction layer in the design flow, it is equivalently a set of design. Model-based design is about using platforms with useful modeling properties to specify designs, and then synthesizing implementations from these specifications. Hence model based design is the view from above (more abstract, closer to the problem domain) and platform-based design is the view from below (less abstract, closer tot he implementation technology.