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SUMMARY
In modern applications there is an increasingly need of coordination models for distributed systems that can face the unpredictability of behaviour of certain system subparts that cannot be handled at design-time because of legacy or deployment issues. Examples include sensor networks, pervasive computing systems, and all those distributed and open systems that involve different entities (services, devices, sensors, humans, and so on) that should opportunistically interoperate.The main requirements of these scenarios are robustness against failures, situatedness and adaptivity, all of which are to be achieved without human or supervised control, thus calling for innovative coordination models. Such scenarios are typically tackled by drawing inspiration from natural systems, where an intrinsic self-organisation exist by which the globally intended behaviour emerges out of local interaction of individuals.
The research team seeks to develop new innovative techniques and tools for their analysis, design and deployment, are to be conceived. They have to support the designer in “controlling the emergence of adaptive behaviours” and in making qualitative and quantitate predictions about how the system works and about possible design errors.
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SOLUTIONS
- Identifying formal models for specifying self-organising systems and analysing their properties, such as stability and resilience
- Developing simulation tools for performing “what-if” analysis
- Developing a rich catalogue of self-organising design patterns and of a methodology supporting their composition to obtain new patterns useful in system engineering
- Conceiving of new computational abstractions and languages, and of corresponding middleware technologies and tools, to mainstream the self-organisation paradigm
- Implementing specific applications of pervasive computing systems, in contexts like smartcities or traffic control
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