Future Internet (Nov 2020)

Pulverization in Cyber-Physical Systems: Engineering the Self-Organizing Logic Separated from Deployment

  • Roberto Casadei,
  • Danilo Pianini,
  • Andrea Placuzzi,
  • Mirko Viroli,
  • Danny Weyns

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/fi12110203
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 11
p. 203

Abstract

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Emerging cyber-physical systems, such as robot swarms, crowds of augmented people, and smart cities, require well-crafted self-organizing behavior to properly deal with dynamic environments and pervasive disturbances. However, the infrastructures providing networking and computing services to support these systems are becoming increasingly complex, layered and heterogeneous—consider the case of the edge–fog–cloud interplay. This typically hinders the application of self-organizing mechanisms and patterns, which are often designed to work on flat networks. To promote reuse of behavior and flexibility in infrastructure exploitation, we argue that self-organizing logic should be largely independent of the specific application deployment. We show that this separation of concerns can be achieved through a proposed “pulverization approach”: the global system behavior of application services gets broken into smaller computational pieces that are continuously executed across the available hosts. This model can then be instantiated in the aggregate computing framework, whereby self-organizing behavior is specified compositionally. We showcase how the proposed approach enables expressing the application logic of a self-organizing cyber-physical system in a deployment-independent fashion, and simulate its deployment on multiple heterogeneous infrastructures that include cloud, edge, and LoRaWAN network elements.

Keywords