An architectural framework and a middleware for cooperating smart components

In a future networked physical world, a myriad of smart sensors and actuators assess and control aspects of their environments and autonomously act in response to it. Examples range in telematics, traffic management, team robotics or home automation to name a few. To a large extent, such systems operate proactively and independently of direct human control driven by the perception of the environment and the ability to organize respective computations dynamically. The challenging characteristics of these applications include sentience and autonomy of components, issues of responsiveness and safety criticality, geographical dispersion, mobility and evolution. A crucial design decision is the choice of opriate abstractions and interaction mechanisms. Looking to the basic building blocks of such systems we may find components which comprise mechanical components, hardware and software and a network interface, thus these components have different characteristics compared to pure software...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CF
• Authors: Antonio Casimiro, Jörg Kaiser, Paulo Veríssimo
• Keywords: Building Blocks, CF 2004, Generic Event Layer, Larger Autonomous Components