Parallelising an Erlang Multi-Agent System

Program Shaping is the process of transforming a sequential program in order to better enable the introduction of parallelism. While algorithmic skeletons abstract away the low-level aspects of parallel programming that often plague traditional techniques, skeletons cannot always be readily introduced to sequential code. Data may not always be in a compatible format, function design may not be conducive to a single point of invocation, or there may be dependencies between functions and data obstructive to the introduction of parallelism. Program Shaping can be used to transform such code, producing a form to which skeletons can be introduced. We present a series of generic Program Shaping rewrite rules, and their implementation as refactorings, and demonstrate their application to an Erlang Multi-Agent System (MAS).