Self-adaptive On-the-fly Spatial Services for Open Smart Environments

Spatial services are a new generation of services. They exploits spatially distributed data, enable smart environments, or exploit Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. This is a new category of decentralised services based on data propagation among mobile devices. These services are provided as the result of the collective interactions among multiple entities, involving processes and calculations. It takes place across several geographically distributed computational nodes. Moreover, research in the engineering of collective adaptive systems provides advances in the identification of bio-inspired self-organising mechanisms and their expression as design patterns. Fine-grained analysis of these mechanisms, when taken in isolation or combined with each other, and their sensitivity to parameters in relation with non-functional properties is still lacking. Dynamic composition of these mechanisms and providing reliable non-functional properties, through dynamic adaptation of parameters, is not yet considered in the literature. Spatial system services built on self-organising mechanisms are relevant in specific application contexts, particularly in open smart environment and for applications deployed over several nodes. Their performance de- pends on good calibration and some of them can be in competition for a specific application. The goal of this research project is to determine at run-time the most appropriate mechanism. Services should be well calibrated in dynamic situations to guarantee appropriate non-functional properties expressed as quality of service (QoS). It also intends to develop a model for on-the-fly creation of spatial services. These services are deployed over a geographic area and providing requested non-functional properties. In open smart environments, it is only at run-time that the need for a spatial user-service arises and it is through the collective interactions of existing spatial system services, sensors or other ”Things” that the requested user-service is provided.