Infrastructure for Engineered Emergence on Sensor/Actuator Networks

abstraction rules that hide the complexity of systems of components. We've begun this process in the domain of sensor/actuator network applications, observing that in manyapplicationsthedeployednetworkapproximates a physical space and that the space, rather than the network, is being programmed. This observation lets us amorphous medium abstraction to decouple self-management problems. So, global behavior descriptions in our Proto language can be compiled automatically into locally executed code that produces emergent phenomena matching the global description. We've experimentally verified our code both in simulation and (for small programs) on a network of sensor/actuator nodes called Mica2 motes. Decoupling: Amorphous medium Consider deploying a network of devices to manage a large farm. The tasks that the devices will carry out--irrigation, pest management, and fertilization, for example--are naturally specified in terms of regions of the farm: "water a potato field e...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: EXPERT
• Authors: Jacob Beal, Jonathan Bachrach
• Keywords: Abstraction, Amorphous Medium, Amorphous Medium Abstraction, EXPERT 2006