The goal of this theme is to develop the infrastructural software and architectural techniques for a proactive world, where networked sensors and actuators enable cooperating computing and networking infrastructure to provide smarter environments for humans to operate in. A central part of this effort is a hierarchical and compositional system architecture, supported by a distributed, loosely coupled executive that we call the "SwarmOS." This architecture must accommodate heterogeneous and dynamic compositions of sensor and actuator devices, mobile vehicles, handheld devices, networking components, and cloud infrastructure. A key challenge is to dynamically balance the needs of distributed concurrent application resources, quality of service (QoS), and real-time guarantees. Equally important is the need to respect the privacy and integrity of streams of information. Building on the support of the SwarmOS, TerraSwarm applications will be structured as dynamic, hierarchical graphs of services, with components providing assured quality of service through resource brokerage.
See the Proactive Worlds Workgroup for details.