Fluidware: Novel Approaches for Large-Scale IoT Systems

This book provides an overview of the many approaches that can adopted for programming and deploying highly-adaptive and large-scale IoT systems, with a specific focus on the key results achieved within the Fluidware research project. The authors start by presenting Fluidware, which develops a novel programming model for IoT services and applications, along with the associated and robust large-scale IoT services and applications. Starting from previous findings in the areas of field-based coordination, collective adaptive systems, stream computing and aggregate computing, the authors address the complexity of building modern, large-scale IoT systems, by a full-fledged engineering approach revolving around a new notion of distributed programming. The authors show how the key innovative idea of Fluidware is to abstract collectives of devices of the IoT fabric as sources, digesters, and targets of distributed “flows” of contextualized events, carrying information about data produced and actuating commands. The book is divided into three parts: (i) the first part is a general introduction to the Fluidware ideas and to the key problems associated with programming IoT systems, (ii) the second part presents the key results achieved within the Fluidware project; (iii) the third part identified open challenges and research directions.

• Provides an overview of approaches for programming and deploying highly-adaptive and large-scale IoT systems;

• Focuses on the key results achieved within the Fluidware research project, which develops a novel programming model for IoT services and applications;

• Presents results achieved within the Fluidware project and identifies open challenges and research directions.

Franco Zambonelli is full professor of Computer Science at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He got his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Bologna in 1997. His research interests include: pervasive computing, multi-agent systems, self-adaptive and self-organizing systems, with applications to healthcare and smart cities. He has published over 130 papers in peer-reviews journals, and has been invited speaker at many conferences and workshops. He is in the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Springer-Nature Computer Science Journal, IEEE Society & Technology Magazine, the BCS Computer Journal, the Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications. He has been scientific manager of the EU FP6 Project CASCADAS and coordinator of the EU FP7 Project SAPERE and of the PRIN 2017 Project Fluidware. He is ACM Distinguished Scientist, member of the Academia Europaea, IEEE Fellow, and has been recipient of the 2018 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award.

Giancarlo Fortino (IEEE Fellow 22) is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Dept of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems of the University of Calabria (Unical), Italy. He received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Unical in 2000. He is also distinguished professor at Wuhan University of Technology and Huazhong Agricultural University (China), high-end expert at HUST (China), senior research fellow at the Italian ICAR-CNR Institute, CAS PIFI visiting scientist at SIAT – Shenzhen, and Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Sensors Council. At Unical, he is the Rector’s delegate to Int’l relations, the chair of the PhD School in ICT, the director of the Postgraduate Master course in INTER-IoT, and the director of the SPEME lab as well as co-chair of Joint labs on IoT established between Unical and WUT, SMU and HZAU Chinese universities, respectively. Fortino is currently the scientific responsible of the Digital Health groupof the Italian CINI National Laboratory at Unical. He is Highly Cited Researcher 2002 and 2021 in Computer Science by Clarivate. Currently he has 19 highly cited papers in WoS, and h-index=63 with 14700+ citations in Google Scholar. His research interests include wearable computing systems, e-Health, Internet of Things, and agent-based computing. He is author of 550+ papers in int’l journals, conferences and books. He is (founding) series editor of IEEE Press Book Series on Human- Machine Systems and EiC of SpringerInternet of Things series and AE of premier int’l journals such as IEEE TAFFC-CS, IEEE THMS, IEEE T-AI, IEEE IoTJ, IEEE SJ, IEEE JBHI, IEEE SMCM, IEEE OJEMB, IEEE OJCS, Information Fusion, JNCA, EAAI, etc. He organized as chair many int’l workshops and conferences (110+), was involved in a huge number of int’l conferences/workshops (500+) as IPC member, is/was guest-editor of many special issues (70+). He is cofounder and CEO of SenSysCal S.r.l., a Unical spinoff focused oninnovative IoT systems. Fortino is currently member of the IEEE SMCS BoG and of the IEEE Press BoG, and chair of the IEEE SMCS Italian Chapter.

Barbara Re is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Camerino. She received her PhD in Information Science and Complex Systems from Camerino University. Her research interests refer to Business Process Management, from modelling to analysis. Particular attention is paid to push the use of formal methods as methodological and automatic tools to develop high-quality process-aware information systems. More recently, she was involved in research activities related to IoT aware process-aware information systems, including multi-robot systems. She was involved in multidisciplinary research projects collaborating with national and international research institutes and companies.

Mirko Viroli is Full Professor in Computer Engineering at the University of Bologna, Italy. He i^7000 citations. He is senior member of ACM and IEEE, member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Software magazine, and was program chair of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2008 and 2009), and IEEE Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing systems (SASO 2014) conferences.