Towards Automated Engineering for Collective Adaptive Systems: Vision and Research Directions

The opportunities and challenges of recent and forthcoming distributed computing scenarios have been promoting research on languages and paradigms aimed at modelling the macro/collective behaviour of systems as well as mechanisms to endow them with self-* capabilities. One example is the aggregate computing paradigm, which supports the development of self-organising systems (e.g., robot swarms, computational ecosystems, and crowd-based services) through various formalisms and tools developed over a decade. However, very limited work has been done by a methodological and automation perspective. In this paper, we explore the issue of organising the development process of aggregate computing systems. Accordingly, we outline novel research directions that arise from careful analysis of the peculiar issues in collective and self-organising systems, the cornerstones of effective software engineering practices, and recent scientific trends and insights.