Mirko Viroli, Ferruccio Damiani

Computational fields are spatially distributed data structures created by diffusion/aggregation processes, designed to adapt their shape to the topology of the underlying (mobile) network and to the events occurring in it: they have been proposed in a thread of recent works addressing self-organisation mechanisms for system coordination in scenarios including pervasive computing, sensor networks, and mobile robots. A key challenge for these systems is to assure behavioural correctness, namely, correspondence of micro-level specification (computational field specification) with macro-level behaviour (resulting global spatial pattern). Accordingly, in this paper we investigate the propagation process of computational fields, especially when composed one another to achieve complex spatial structures. We present a tiny, expressive, and type-sound calculus of computational fields, enjoying self-stabilisation, i.e., the ability of computational fields to react to changes in the environment finding a new stable state in finite time.

Keywords: Spatial Computing, Self-Organising Coordination, Core Calculus

Coordination Models and Languages, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8459, pages 163-178, 2014.
eva Kühn, Rosario Pugliese (eds.), Springer-Verlag
Best paper award at Discotec 2014!

@inCollection{VD-COORD2014-LNCS2014,
	author = {Viroli, Mirko and Ferruccio Damiani},
	title = {A Calculus of Self-stabilising Computational Fields},
   booktitle = {Coordination Languages and Models},
   editor = {eva K{\"u}hn and
               Rosario Pugliese},
	volume =    8459,
   series =    {LNCS},
   year =      2014,
   month =     jun,
   publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
   pages =     {163--178},
	note = {Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (Coordination 2014), Berlin (Germany), 3-5 June},
   issn =      {0302-9743},
   doi={10.1007/978-3-662-43376-8\_11}
}