A Self-Organising Solution to the Collective Sort Problem in Distributed Tuple Spaces

Coordination languages and models are recently moving towards the application of techniques coming from the research context of complex systems: adaptivity and self-organisation are exploited in order to tackle typical features of systems to coordinate, such as openness, dynamism and unpredictability. In this paper we focus on a paradigmatic problem we call collective sort, where autonomous agents are assigned the task of moving tuples across different tuple spaces with the goal of reaching perfect clustering: tuples of the same kind are to be collected in the same, unique tuple space. We describe a self-organising solution to this problem, where each agent moves tuples according to partial observations, still making complete sorting emerge from any initial tuple configuration.