Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling

Abstract

Macroprogramming refers to the theory and practice of conveniently expressing the macro(scopic) behaviour of a system using a single program. Macroprogramming approaches are motivated by the need of effectively capturing global/system-level aspects and the collective behaviour of a set of interacting components, while abstracting over low-level details. In the past, this style of programming has been primarily adopted to describe the data-processing logic in wireless sensor networks; recently, research forums on spatial computing, collective adaptive systems, and Internet-of-Things have provided renewed interest in macro-approaches. However, related contributions are still fragmented and lacking conceptual consistency. Therefore, to foster principled research, an integrated view of the field is provided, together with opportunities and challenges.

78 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables; submitted to Foundations and Trends in Programming Languages

References in corpus (2)

• Time-Fluid Field-Based Coordination through Programmable Distributed Schedulers
• Organizing the Aggregate: Languages for Spatial Computing

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