Field-based Approaches to Adaptive Motion Coordination in Pervasive Computing Scenarios

Abstract

Abstract. Enabling and ruling coordination activities in mobile computing scenarios challenge traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This chapter focuses on Distributed Motion Coordination, i.e., the problems of coordinating the movements of a group of ”agents ” (e.g., mobile devices, users carrying on those devices, mobile robots and sensors) and focuses on the idea of field-based approaches to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in field-based approaches is to have the agents’ movements driven by computational force fields, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure and propagated across the environment. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in agents’ movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of agents following the fields ’ shape and of dynamic fields re-shaping. This chapter shows that field-based approaches enable the definition of adaptive and effective coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented above existing middleware infrastructures. Several applications examples expressing a variety of motion coordination patterns are presented, and both modeled in dynamical systems terms and tested in a simulated implementation. In addition, the programming model to code fields is presented in the context of a reference middleware implementation. 1