Abstract: The dynamics of pervasive ecosystems are typically highly unpredictable, and therefore self-organising approaches are often exploited to make their applications resilient to changes and failures.
The SAPERE approach we illustrate in this paper aims at addressing this issue by taking inspiration from natural ecosystems, which are regulated by a limited set of "laws" evolving the population of individuals in a self-organising way.
Analogously, in our approach, a set of so-called eco-laws coordinate the individuals of the pervasive computing system (humans, devices, signals), in a way that is shown to be expressive enough to model and implement interesting real-life scenarios.
We exemplify the proposed framework discussing a crowd evacuation application, tuning and validating it by simulation.
Abstract: The term Domain Specific Modeling Language (DSML) is used in software development to indicate a modeling (and sometimes programming) language dedicated to a particular problem domain, a particular problem representation technique and/or a particular solution technique. The concept is not new â special-purpose programming language and all kinds of modeling/specification languages have always existed, but the term DSML has become more popular due to the rise of domain-specific modeling. Domain-specific languages are considered 4GL programming languages.
Domain-specific modeling techniques have been adopted for a number of years now. However, the techniques and frameworks used still suffer from problems of complexity of use and fragmentation. Although in recent times some integrated environments are seeing the light, it is not common to see many concrete use cases in which domain-specific modeling has been put to use.
The main goal of this thesis is tackling the domain of interactive systems and applying a DSML-based workflow which leads from a system specification to the prototyping of a Graphical User Interface (GUI). We chose to use the domain of Control Systems (CSs) as an example of application for several reasons. Among others, it needs modularity, interactivity, property validation; it requires the development of a user interface; and the domain experts are not typically expert software engineers.
CSs can be defined as mechanisms that provide output variables of a system by manipulating its inputs (from sensors or commands). While some CSs can be very simple (e.g., a thermostate) and pose little or no problem to modeling using general-purpose formalisms, other CSs can be complex with respect to the number of components, dimensions, physical and functional organization and supervision issues.
A complex CS will generally have a composite structure, in which each object can be grouped with others; composite objects can be, in their turn, components (or âchildrenâ) of larger objects, forming a hierarchical tree in which the root represents the whole system and the leaves are its most elementary devices. Controlling and supervising such complex systems requires the development of complex GUIs, which can benefit from adopting a domain-specific methodology.
The outcome of the thesis is the definition of a methodology that allows easy prototyping of a GUI for interactive systems. The take-away lesson is giving readers a concrete working example of how to build a similar methodology for their domain.
