Building Blocks for Aggregate Programming of Self-Organising Applications

Abstract

The notion of a computational field has been proposed as a unifying abstraction for constructing and reasoning about large and self-organising networks of devices, focusing on the computations and coordination of aggregates of devices instead of individual behaviour. Recently, firm mathematical foundations have been established for this approach, in the form of a minimal universal field calculus and a more restricted syntax that guarantees self-stabilisation. We now aim to raise the abstraction level for system construction by identifying a collection of general and reusable "building block" algorithms. By functional combination of these building blocks, it is possible to construct complex adaptive behaviours. Moreover, the building blocks we present are all self-stabilising, ensuring that any system constructed from them is guaranteed to rapidly converge to a correct behaviour.