Best ACM SAC Articles on Coordination and Self-Adaptation

Abstract

The continuous evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) systems opens a broad range of potential applications in domains such as smart environments, transportation, and energy management. However, it also brings a dramatic increase in complexity: the envisioned ICT systems run in highly dynamic socio-technico-physical environments, often composed of thousands or even millions of connected heterogeneous components, including social networks, web services, mobile computational devices , data centers, and environmental sensors. Traditional centralized approaches hardly deal with those new requirements, especially as far as robustness, resiliency, and complexity are concerned. Rather, computation needs to be carried out in a fully distributed way, and each computational component needs to be autonomous, adaptive, able to perceive contextual information from its environment, and able to collaborate with other components to coordinate emerging complex behaviors. Coordination models and languages, traditionally introduced to tackle interactions in complex systems by suitably designed abstractions such as shared spaces and channels , play a key role in such future and emerging ICT systems. A coordination model simplifies the integration of heterogeneous components (processes, objects, agents, services) and makes the resulting ensemble more smoothly executed as a whole, forming a distributed software system with desired characteristics and functionalities. More specifically, due to the clear separation between computation and interaction they promote , coordination models provide a natural support for injecting self-adaption and self-organization into applications, allowing one to achieve very complex and robust behaviors in terms of a coherent and simple set of coordination rules and mechanisms. All of this is carried out by means of coordination abstractions, languages, algorithms, mechanisms, and middleware specifically focused on the management of component interactions. The " Coordination Models, languages and applications " (CM) track started in 1998 at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) as one of the main scientific events under the umbrella of Coordination, specifically focused to fill the gap between theory and applications. During the successful series of its 17 editions, we have witnessed the emergence of models, formalisms, and mechanisms supporting distributed systems in a number of application scenarios. Most contributions crosscut a number of contemporary software engineering approaches and fields, attracting researchers from many areas inside ICT systems, such as multiagent systems, embedded systems, mobile computing, and robotics. In particular, the latest editions featured an increasing interest in self-adaptive and self-organizing mechanisms and systems. As a result, we decided to foster the development of coordination models …