Injecting Self-Organisation into Pervasive Service Ecosystems

Pervasive service ecosystems are a new paradigm for the design of context-aware systems featuring adaptivity and self-awareness. A theoretical and practical framework has been proposed for addressing these scenarios, taking primary inspirations from natural ecosystems and grounding upon two basic abstractions: “live semantic annotations” (LSAs), which are descriptions stored in infrastructure nodes and wrapping data, knowledge, and activities of humans, devices, and services; and “eco-laws”, acting as system rules evolving the population of LSAs as if they were molecules subject to chemical-like reactions. In this paper, we aim at deepening how self-organisation can be injected in pervasive service ecosystems in terms This work has been supported by the EU-FP7-FET Proactive project SAPERE Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems, under contract no.256873. S. Montagna (B) · M. Viroli Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, Via Venezia 52, 47521 Cesena, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Viroli e-mail: [email protected] J. L. Fernandez-Marquez · G. Di Marzo Serugendo University of Geneva, Battelle, Batiment A, Route de Drize 7, 1227 Carouge, Switzerland J. L. Fernandez-Marquez e-mail: [email protected] G. Di Marzo Serugendo e-mail: [email protected] F. Zambonelli Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via G. Amendola 2, 42122 Reggio Emilia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] of spatial structures and algorithms for supporting the design of context-aware applications. To this end, we start from an existing classification of self-organisation patterns, and systematically show how they can be supported in pervasive service ecosystems, and be composed to generate a self-organising emergent behaviour. A paradigmatic crowd steering case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.