Emergent Coordination in Pervasive Service Ecosystems

Several today and emergent applications of pervasive computing (smartcities, sensor networks, traffic control) are based on the opportunistic encounter of large set of individuals (people, software services, data items, computational devices), with typically partial a-priori knowledge of each other's existence, dynamics and goals. This requires challenging levels of opennes, self-adaptivity, and self-organisation, wich we argue can be supported only as emergent coordination phenomena. A medium-term research goal is hence headed towards the introduction of suitable models and abstractions (and thereafter, languages and platforms), grounding an engineering methodology on top of the lesson of natural systems. In this talk we will report on recent advances in this context, rooted on novel self-organisation patterns and coordination languages, along with their application in scenarios of pervasive service ecosystems.