A survey on nature‐inspired metaphors for pervasive service ecosystems

Abstract

Purpose-Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated and self-adaptive behaviors, and supporting diversity in services and long-term evolvability. This suggests adopting a nature-inspired approach, where pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. However, there are many possibly nature-inspired metaphors that can be adopted, and choosing one may require a careful analysis of the pros and cons of the different metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key requirements and desiderata for next generation pervasive computing services and associated infrastructures. Design/methodology/approach-In this paper, the authors introduce and critically analyze a number of natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize these concepts and survey relevant proposals in the area. Findings-The key result of this survey is that a uniform reference architecture can be a useful guide when framing the challenges involved in the design and implementation of future self-adaptive pervasive service ecosystems. Originality/value-The survey in this paper, along with the proposed reference architecture, can be effective starting points towards the definition and implementation of general-purpose nature-inspired pervasive service ecosystems.

A survey of autonomic computing methods in digital service ecosystems

“…• SAPERE [15][16][17][18][19][20] • CASCADAS [21][22][23] • BIONETS [24][25][26][27] • service reconfiguration for service ecosystems [80]. Figure 5 and Table 3 provide a comparison of these four primary methods.…”

“…The authors' method has matured and evolved in many research papers [15][16][17][18][19][20]. The middleware implemented has been validated in the context of exemplary use cases on information and guidance services in a smart museum.…”

“…In [15][16][17][18][19][20], the authors propose a nature-inspired reference architecture called SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems), which can be a useful guide in the design and implementation of self-adaptive pervasive service ecosystems. They identify several research challenges emerging from the convergence of cyber-physical worlds, such as comprehensive situation-awareness, top-down vs. bottom-up design, power of masses, decentralized control, and diversity and evolvability [19].…”

“…In recent years, several methods and techniques have been proposed to exploit the benefits of the AC initiative in service-oriented ecosystems, for example, SAPERE [15][16][17][18][19][20], CASCADAS [21][22][23] and BIONETS [24][25][26][27]. However, very little work has applied the AC initiative in the DSEs domain [28][29][30].…”

Engineering Environment Mediated Natural Coordination for Multiagent Systems in SAPERE

“…To support the vision, a great deal of research activity in pervasive computing has been devoted to meet the requirements of pervasive service systems, i.e. : supporting self-configuration and context-aware composition; enforcing self-adaptability and self-organization; and ensuring that service frameworks can be highly-flexible and long-lasting [7]. The SAPERE ("Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems") approach [8] tackles the problem at the foundation, conceiving a radically new way of modeling integrated pervasive services and their execution environments.…”