Organizing the Aggregate

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, the authors 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.

Materials that couple sensing, actuation, computation, and communication

“…From a computational perspective, robotic materials can be viewed as an amorphous (18) or spatial computer (72), which attempt to formalize a distributed computation model for systems that are limited to local communication and limited computational resources at each node. A key challenge in amorphous computing is how to design local interactions so that a desired global behavior can emerge.…”

On Distributed Runtime Verification by Aggregate Computing

“…The problem of finding suitable programming models for ensemble of devices has been the subject of intensive research-see e.g. the surveys [10,32]: works as TOTA [26] and Hood [33] provide abstractions over the single device to facilitate construction of macro-level systems; GPL [15] and others are used to express spatial and geometric patterns; Regiment [27] and TinyLime [16] are information systems used to stream and summarise information over space-time regions; while MGS [21] and the fixpoint approach in [25] provide general purpose space-time computing models. Aggregate computing and the field calculus have then be developed as a generalisation of the above approaches, with the goal of defining a programming model with sufficient expressiveness to describe complex distributed processes by a functional-oriented compositional model, whose semantics is defined in terms of gossip-like computational processes.…”

Resiliency with Aggregate Computing: State of the Art and Roadmap

“…Engineering collective systems has long been a subject of interest in a wide variety of fields, from biology to robotics, networking to high-performance computing, and many more; a thorough survey of this history may be found in [4], which we summarise here. As the foundational issues of engineering collective adaptive systems remain the same, particularly when dealing with systems embedded in geometric space and having goals linked to that space (also known as spatial computers), a number of common themes have emerged across the multitude of approaches that have been developed.…”

“…For example, a crowd safety service needs to know the density and distribution of people through the environment, not the location of individuals, and users of a bike-sharing system do not typically care which bicycle or station they use as long as one is readily available nearby. Building on the natural expression of such properties in terms of collections of values spread over regions of space, called computational fields [26,4], aggregate computing factors the challenging problems of building collective adaptive systems into several abstraction layers, each of which can be engineered independently and much more tractably.…”