Abstract
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.
This work has been partially supported by the EU FP7 project “SAPERE - Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems” under contract No. 256873 (Viroli), by ICT COST Action IC1201 “BETTY: Behavioural Types for Reliable Large-Scale Software Systems” (Damiani), by the Italian PRIN 2010/2011 project “CINA: Compositionality, Interaction, Negotiation, Autonomicity” (Damiani & Viroli) and Ateneo/CSP project SALT (Damiani).
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Viroli, M., Damiani, F. (2014). A Calculus of Self-stabilising Computational Fields. In: Kühn, E., Pugliese, R. (eds) Coordination Models and Languages. COORDINATION 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8459. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43376-8_11
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