Computational Resources.

By a computational resource we mean anything which is required to perform a certain computational task, either as a prerequisite to initiate its execution or while the task is performed. Examples of well known computational resources are time and space or memory. Other examples are bandwidth, i.e. the information capacity of communication channels, or various service fees which may be charged by some service provider. Resources are strongly related to a quantitative description of computation, and taking them into account requires us to abandon a merely qualitative study of computing. We will often refer to ``computational resources'' simply as ``resources''.

The questions which we will concentrate on are concerned with access, availability and consumption of resources. We will investigate methods for the (probabilistic) analysis and verification of properties related to problems in computer security (authorised resource access), coordination (resource availability in time and space), performance (resource consumption over time), quality of service (resource availability), etc. Starting from the definition that `` economics is the study of how societies use scarce resources to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among different people'' [61, p4] we will look at problems related to the ``economics of computational resources'', i.e. of how to optimise and organise resource consumption, distribution and production in computing.