Engineering Emergent Ecologies of Interacting Artefacts

Nowadays, our living environments already provide ubiquitous network connectivity and are populated by an increasing number of artefacts (objects enhanced with sensing, computation, and networking abilities). In addition, people are increasingly using mobile devices as intermediaries between themselves and the artefacts. In order to create, manage, communicate with, and reason about ubiquitous computing environments that involve hundreds of interacting artefacts and cooperating mobile devices, we propose to embed, in these entities, social memory, enhanced context memory, and shared experiences. In this context, we describe an engineering approach and a framework to deal with emergent ecologies of locally interacting artefacts that provide services not existing initially in the individuals, and exhibiting them in a consistent and fault-tolerant way. Because they are emergent, their structure or availability are not predefined or known before hand; we draw from swarm intelligence methods to describe such ecologies.