A Fixpoint-based Calculus for Graph-shaped Computational Fields

During the last edition of DisCoTec 2015 [http://discotec2015.inria.fr/]  the paper
A Fixpoint-based Calculus for Graph-shaped Computational Fields
Alberto Lluch Lafuente, Michele Loreti and Ugo Montanari
received the Best Paper Award.
In the paper a calculus that aims at providing a general framework for supporting coordination of collective adaptive systems has been
proposed. Basic ingredients of the new language are computational fields. These have been proposed as models for several coordination applications, like amorphous computing, routing in mobile ad hoc and sensor networks, situated multi agent ecologies, like swarms, and finally for robotics applications, like coordination of teams of modular robots.
In the proposed calculus, named SMuC (Soft Mu-calculus for Computational fields), computation is strictly synchronous and corresponds to sequential computations of fixpoints in a graph-shaped field that represents the space topology.
Our graph-based fields are essentially networks with attributes on both nodes and arcs, where arcs represent interaction capabilities between nodes.
In particular, fixpoints can be computed by synchronised iterations under reasonable conditions, where in each iteration the attribute of a node is updated based on the attributes of the neighbours in the previous iteration.
To illustrate our approach, a simple case study based on a disaster recovery scenario has been used. A prototype simulator have been also used to evaluate the performance of a disaster recovery strategy.
The DisCoTec series of federated conference is one of the major events sponsored by the International Federation for Information processing (IFIP). The main conferences involved in DisCoTec are:
* COORDINATION, IFIP International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages
* DAIS, IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
* FORTE, IFIP Joint International Conference on Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems