Organizing the Aggregate: Languages for Spatial Computing

Abstract

As the number of computing devices embedded into engineered systems continues to rise, there is a widening gap between the needs of the user to control aggregates of devices and the complex technology of individual devices. Spatial computing attempts to bridge this gap for systems with local communication by exploiting the connection between physical locality and device connectivity. A large number of spatial computing domain specific languages (DSLs) have emerged across diverse domains, from biology and reconfigurable computing, to sensor networks and agent-based systems. In this chapter, we develop a framework for analyzing and comparing spatial computing DSLs, survey the current state of the art, and provide a roadmap for future spatial computing DSL investigation.

Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling

“…Spatial computing approaches are extensively surveyed in (Beal et al, 2012) (see Section 7 for details on the study) and include examplars of macroprogramming such as Regiment (Newton et al, 2007) and MacroLab (Hnat et al, 2008).…”

“…The general idea is to provide high-level abstractions capturing system-wide concerns by making assumptions promoting convenient mapping to component-level concerns. As such assumptions tend to be specific to an application domain, macroprogramming languages typically take the form of domain-specific languages (DSLs) (Beal et al, 2012).…”

“…The most related survey is (Beal et al, 2012), which however focusses on spatial computing languages. It proposes a conceptual framework where spatial computation can be described in terms of constructs for (i) measuring space-time (sensors); (ii) manipulating space-time (actuators); (iii) computation; and (iv) physical evolution (inherent spatiotemporal dynamics).…”

Partitioned integration and coordination via the self-organising coordination regions pattern

“…Logical neighbourhoods leverage neighbourhood templates matching node attributes, similarly to attribute-based communication paradigms [54]. Recent surveys [55,56] cover these and other related abstractions, aimed at managing dynamic groups (also called ensembles) of interacting entities, that may be adopted in implementations of the SCR pattern to deal with network-wide connectivity and communications.…”

Towards attack-resistant Aggregate Computing using trust mechanisms

“…Approaches for programming collectives of devices have been investigated in many fields and applications, including spatial computing, multi-agent systems, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), swarm robotics, P2P systems, and so on. In fact, Aggregate Computing itself arose as a generalisation of a number of previous methods and languages, extensively surveyed in [32] where four main families are identified: i. device abstraction languages (e.g., TOTA [33], Hood [34]) that simplify the programming of individual networked devices, for instance by supporting local communications; ii. pattern languages (e.g., GPL [35], OSL [36]) that provide means for arranging elements according to geometric and topological patterns; iii.…”