No abstract

grateful. This thesis was inspired by the insightful work from Dr. Laisa Costa, who patiently accompanied this work from its inception. Her advice and opportune feedback were essential to conduct the present thesis until a satisfactory conclusion. Whenever I was in doubt in the capricious course of the research path, I could always rely on the accurate advice from my second advisor, Prof. Flávio Corrêa da Silva. After long sessions of conversation accompanied by a cup of good co ee, Prof. Corrêa da Silva o ered the wise words I needed. My third advisor, Prof. Marcelo Zu o, was undoubtedly the cornerstone of this cooperation. As the leader of the Interdisciplinary Center of Interactive Technologies (CITI), he is responsible for the development of cutting-edge technology in Brazil, of which this thesis is a humble sample. Proving that the whole if greater than the sum of the parts, the Swarm team at CITI has produced a tremendous work during these years, in the form of scienti c articles, system design, software architecture, application development and abundant documentation. This thesis has directly bene ted from that development and I would like to express my gratitude to all the talented people that participated in the Swarm team. Mr. Geovane Fedrecheski provided the o cial SwarmBroker implementation and the initial version of the SwarmLib, on top of which I implemented the framework. Mr. Carlos Laschi actively collaborated in the de nition of the Geolocation Ontology for the Swarm that is presented in this work. Mr. Gabriel Duarte and Mr. Phillipe Rangel participated in the de nition of the economic model for the Swarm, also presented in this thesis. Mr. Guilherme C. Marques and Matheus Guinezi contributed with the initial version of the Swar-mAssistant, which is the basis of the case study used in this work. Also, Dr. Samira Afzal kindly helped with the revision of this document.