Context-Aware Programming for Hybrid and Diversity-Aware Collective Adaptive Systems

Collective adaptive systems (CASs) have been researched intensively since many years. However, the recent emerging developments and advanced models in service-oriented computing, cloud computing and human computation have fostered several new forms of CASs. Among them, Hybrid and Diversity-aware CASs (HDA-CASs) characterize new types of CASs in which a collective is composed of hybrid machines and humans that collaborate together with different complementary roles. This emerging HDA-CAS poses several research challenges in terms of programming, management and provisioning. In this paper, we investigate the main issues in programming HDA-CASs. First, we analyze context characterizing HDA-CASs. Second, we propose to use the concept of hybrid compute units to implement HDA-CASs that can be elastic. We call this type of HDA-CASs h(2) CAS (Hybrid Compute Unit-based HDA-CAS). We then discuss a meta-view of h(2) CAS that describes a h(2) CAS program. We analyze and present program features for h(2) CAS in four main different contexts.