Roberto Casadei, Mirko Viroli, Giorgio Audrito, Danilo Pianini, Ferruccio Damiani

Engineering distributed applications and services in emerging and open computing scenarios like the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems and pervasive computing, calls for identifying proper abstractions to smoothly capture collective behaviour, adaptivity, and dynamic injection and execution of concurrent distributed activities. Accordingly, we introduce a notion of “aggregate process” as a concurrent field computation whose execution and interactions are sustained by a dynamic team of devices, and whose spatial region can opportunistically vary over time. We formalise this notion by extending the Field Calculus with a new primitive construct, spawn, used to instantiate a set of field computations and regulate key aspects of their life-cycle. By virtue of an open-source implementation in the ScaFi framework, we show basic programming examples and benefits via two case studies of mobile ad-hoc networks and drone swarm scenarios, evaluated by simulation.

Keywords: Aggregate processes, Computational fields, Distributed computing, Collective coordination, Dynamic ensembles, Self-*

Coordination Models and Languages, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 11533, pages 200-217, 2019.
Hanne Riis Nielson, Emilio Tuosto (eds.), Springer
21st IFIP WG 6.1 International Conference, COORDINATION 2019, Held as Part of the 14th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2019, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, June 17-21, 2019, Proceedings

@inproceedings{CVAPD-COORD2019,
	Author = {Casadei, Roberto and Viroli, Mirko and Audrito, Giorgio and Pianini, Danilo and Damiani, Ferruccio},
	Booktitle = {Coordination Models and Languages},
	Doi = {10.1007/978-3-030-22397-7_12},
	Editor = {Riis Nielson, Hanne and Tuosto, Emilio},
	Note = {21st {IFIP} {WG} 6.1 International Conference, {COORDINATION} 2019, Held as Part of the 14th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2019, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, June 17-21, 2019, Proceedings},
	Pages = {200--217},
	Publisher = {Springer},
	Series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
	Title = {Aggregate Processes in Field Calculus},
	Url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007978-3-030-22397-7_12},
	Volume = 11533,
	Year = 2019}