1,721,420 research outputs found
Engineering self-organizing urban superorganisms
Full text linkProgresses in ubiquitous, embedded, and social networking and computing make possible for people in urban areas to dynamically interact with each other and with ICT devices around. This can result in a system with a very large number of agents working together in an orchestrated and self-organizing way to achieve specific urban-level goals, i.e., as if they were a “superorganism”. In this paper, we sketch the future vision of urban superorganisms and overview some emerging application areas heading towards the vision. Following, we identify the key challenges in engineering self-organizing multi-agent systems that can work as a superorganism, i.e., seamlessly involving ICT agents and human agents so to achieve some required urban level goals. Finally, we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure to support our future vision of self-organizing urban superorganisms
Self-Management and the Many Facets of ‘Non-self’
No full textThe difficulties in dealing with increasingly complex information systems that have to operatein dynamic operational environments calls for self-management properties or, more ingeneral, for the integration of “self-*” features (e.g., self-configuration, self-adaptation, selfhealing)in software and information systems.The common perspective of nearly all “self-*” approaches is that of considering humanbeings as “non-self” from the information system perspective (Figure 1-a). Indeed, one of thevery common goals of all approaches is to move humans out-of-the-loop, by makinginformation systems able to perform in an autonomous way all that kind of (costly and oftentoo complex to bear) human activity related to configuring and maintaining informationsystems so as to have them properly working under all conditions. However, beside thiscommon perspective, a number of diverse conceptions co-exist for what should be actuallyconsidered “self” and what, beside humans, “non-self”
How to achieve modularity in distributed object allocation
No full textThe paper focuses on language constructs for driving the allocation of parallel object-oriented applications onto a target architecture. The paper analyses the issues that arise in the definition of these constructs and presents the solutions adopted in several systems and programming environments, by discussing their capability of enforcing the principle of modularity. Open issues and future directions of research are outlined
Key Abstractions for IoT-Oriented Software Engineering
Full text linkDespite the progress in Internet of Things (IoT) research, a general software engineering approach for systematic development of IoT systems and applications is still missing. A synthesis of the state of the art in the area can help frame the key abstractions related to such development. Such a framework could be the basis for guidelines for IoT-oriented software engineering
Analysis and Evaluation of Distributed Checkpoint Algorithms to Avoid Roll-Back Propagation
No full textCheckpointing is a very well known mechanism to achieve fault tolerance. In distributed applications where processes can checkpoint independently of each other, a local checkpoint is useful for fault tolerance purposes only if it belongs to at least one consistent global checkpoint. In this case, execution can be restarted from it without needing to rollback the execution in the past. The paper exploits a theoreticalframeworkthatfacilitatesthe definition and analysis of distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid rollback propagation. Several distributed algorithms are presented which avoid roll-back propagation by forcing additional checkpoints in processes. The effectiveness of the algorithms is evaluated in several testbed applications, showing their limited capability of bounding the number of additional checkpoints
Exploiting biased load information in direct-neighbour load balancing policies
No full textMassively parallel architectures require distributed load balancing policies based on local load information only. This may sometime limit their effectiveness. The paper presents a class of direct-neighbour load balancing policies that aim to overcome the limits of locality by introducing biases in the load information exchanged between the system nodes. This permits load information to keep into account a more global view of the system. The efficiency of the presented policies is evaluated in dependence of the characteristics of the system load. Experimental results show that the transmission of biased load information provides high efficiency unless the dynamicity of the load becomes too high, in which case it is preferable to exploit non-biased load information. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
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