Special Track on Self-organizing Complex Systems

摘要

Increasingly inexpensive processors and sensors have made computing systems pervasive to every aspect of our lives. These systems can range from active sensor networks monitoring a facility to passive tags storing location-based information. As these systems become more common, and increase in size and complexity, challenges arise for their programming and control; they become true complex systems. A key challenge is to provide powerful programming models to facilitate the development of applications in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. The main conceptual difficulty is that we typically have direct control only over the local activities of individual components, while the application task is often expressed at the global scale. Bridging the gap between local and global activities is not easy, but it is possible: distributed algorithms have been designed for many tasks ranging from sensor networks and MANET (mobile ad-hoc networks) to organization of information in complex networks. However, most of these algorithms are closely tied to the application task and domain, making them difficult to generalize to solve other tasks.