Pulverization in Cyber-Physical Systems: Engineering the Self-Organizing Logic Separated from Deployment

Roberto Casadei, Danilo Pianini, Andrea Placuzzi, Mirko Viroli and Danny Weyns
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Roberto Casadei: Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, 47521 Cesena FC, Italy
Danilo Pianini: Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, 47521 Cesena FC, Italy
Andrea Placuzzi: Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, 47521 Cesena FC, Italy
Mirko Viroli: Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI), Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, 47521 Cesena FC, Italy
Danny Weyns: Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

Future Internet, 2020, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-28

Abstract: Emerging cyber-physical systems, such as robot swarms, crowds of augmented people, and smart cities, require well-crafted self-organizing behavior to properly deal with dynamic environments and pervasive disturbances. However, the infrastructures providing networking and computing services to support these systems are becoming increasingly complex, layered and heterogeneous—consider the case of the edge–fog–cloud interplay. This typically hinders the application of self-organizing mechanisms and patterns, which are often designed to work on flat networks. To promote reuse of behavior and flexibility in infrastructure exploitation, we argue that self-organizing logic should be largely independent of the specific application deployment. We show that this separation of concerns can be achieved through a proposed “ pulverization approach ”: the global system behavior of application services gets broken into smaller computational pieces that are continuously executed across the available hosts. This model can then be instantiated in the aggregate computing framework, whereby self-organizing behavior is specified compositionally. We showcase how the proposed approach enables expressing the application logic of a self-organizing cyber-physical system in a deployment-independent fashion, and simulate its deployment on multiple heterogeneous infrastructures that include cloud, edge, and LoRaWAN network elements.

Keywords: self-organization; decentralized control; deployment independence; declarative programming; aggregate computing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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