A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices

Coordination and P2P computing

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) refers to a class of systems and/or applications that use distributed resources in a decentralized and autonomous manner to achieve a goal. A number of successful applications, like BitTorrent (for file and content sharing) and SETI@Home (for distributed computing) have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. As a new form of distributed computing, P2P computing has the same coordination problems as other forms of distributed computing. Coordination has been considered an important issue in distributed computing for a long time and many coordination models and languages have been developed. This research focuses on how to solve coordination problems in P2P computing. In particular, it is to provide a seamless P2P computing environment so that the migration of computation components is transparent. This research extends Manifold, an event-driven coordination model, to meet P2P computing requirements and integrates the P2P-Manifold model into an existing platform. The integration hides the complexity of the coordination model and makes the model easy to use

Stigmergy-based Load Scheduling in a Demand Side Management Context

This work proposes an approach, based on a fundamental coordination mechanism from nature, namely stigmergy. The proposed meta-heuristic is utilized to distributively calculate global schedules for a population of customers provided with intelligent devices. These schedules maximize renewable energy sources utilization. Furthermore, this approach is adapted and utilized as a coordination mechanism of autonomous customers to modify their consumption behavior in a real-time optimization context

Coordinating Autonomous Entities

This paper describes STL, a new coordination model and corresponding language. STL's power and expressiveness are shown through a preliminary distributed implementation of a generic autonomybased multi-agent system, which is applied to a collective robotics simulation, thus demonstrating the appropriateness of STL for developing a generic coordination platform for autonomous agents. Keywords: Coordination, Distributed Systems, Autonomous Agents, Collective Robotics. 1 Introduction Coordination constitutes a major scientific domain of Computer Science. Works coming within Coordination encompass conceptual and methodological issues as well as implementations in order to efficiently help expressing and implementing distributed applications. Autonomous Agents, a discipline of Artificial Intelligence which enjoys a boom since a couple of years, embodies inherent distributed applications. Works coming within Autonomous Agents are intended to capitalize on the co-existence of distributed..