Field Based Coordination for Pervasive Multiagent Systems doc

[...]... fundamental role of coordination in the context of such future scenarios and shows the inadequacy of current coordination models and middleware in supporting the development of self-organizing and adaptive applications Part II introduces field -based coordination models and details the CoFields model Specifically, Chap 4 describes field -based coordination as a powerful approach to support coordination in modern... particular from the way masses and particles in our universe move and globally self-organize according to the contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields To acknowledge that inspiration, the model is called Field- based coordination Field- based coordination aims at supporting agents’ activities by providing, through the concept of “computational fields,” a single abstraction... of fieldbased coordination are presented and discussed Chapter 5 presents in detail the Co-Fields model, emphasizing how Co-Fields abstractions overcome some problems at the heart of previous approaches A formal description of the model, obtained by a dynamic system formalism, is presented along with several simulation results Part III focuses on the implementation and deployment of the field -based abstractions... Co-Fields and TOTA at work, by presenting several advanced Co-Fields coordinated applications that have been developed (or simply designed) by making use of the TOTA middleware Chapter 8 focuses on content -based approaches to distributed information access, and shows how Co-Fields and TOTA can flexibly implement it Chapter 9 shows how CoFields and TOTA can be used to promote self-assembly and motion coordination. .. display; image taken from [134]; (c) A tourist accessing information on site by a PDA 2.2 Distinguishing Characteristics 15 Web The Semantic Web is intended to complement humans in areas in which they do not perform well, such as processing large volumes of information quickly or analyzing large texts for certain pieces of information While technologies for semantic data representation, like XML, RDF [158],... Clearly, these operations should by performed by the system in autonomy, without requiring any human intervention that, as previously outlined, is already hard to enforce at deployment time and can be impossible to enforce at runtime • Need for Context-Awareness The dynamism of the network makes it impossible for application components to rely on strong a priori information about their execution context... any coordination model and the associated supporting middleware should provide 1 suitable mechanisms to enable coordination, i.e., interaction and synchronization mechanisms; 2 suitable means to promote context-awareness; With regard to the first point, coordination requires by definition some form of communication between agents and some form of synchronization of activities Besides sharp means to enforce... the Book The main contribution of this book is to present a novel coordination model that – together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – has the potential to form the basis for a general-purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of self-organizing and adaptive distributed applications The proposed coordination model takes its inspiration from the physical world,... infrastructure, intelligent autonomous agents will process and distill such information on the fly to answer specific queries, avoiding information overload The Semantic Web, and other developments such as multiagent systems economies – where intelligent agents will be fully delegated to being economic actors to buy, sell, and negotiate for good – and Grid computing [37] – where any one computer can tap the... promoting radical changes in the upcoming Information and Communication Technology scenario On the one hand, advances in pervasive and embedded computing systems (e.g., smart objects [44, 163], self-assembly [1, 102], sensor networks [33, 105], and distributed MEMS [11, 152]) will soon make our everyday environments populated by myriads of interacting computer -based systems On the other hand, worldwide distributed . 40 XContents Part II Modeling Field- based Coordination 4 Field- Based Coordination 45 4.1 Key Concepts in Field- Based Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.2 ASurveyof Field- BasedApproaches. SummingUp 74 5 Co-Fields and Motion Coordination 75 5.1 The Co-FieldsApproach 75 5.1.1 StructureofFields 75 5.1.2 TheCoordinationField 76 5.1.3 PracticalIssues 77 5.2 ModelingCo-FieldsCoordination. Implementing Field- based Coordination 6 Commercial Off-The-Shelf Implementations 109 6.1 Co-FieldswithDirectCoordination 110 6.2 Co-FieldswithShared DataSpaces 113 6.3 Co-FieldswithEvent-BasedInfrastructure