Correspondence:
[‡]
Address for correspondence: Department of Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Str Academiei 14, Bucharest 010014, Romania
Note: [*] Parts of the results in this paper have been presented to the FROM-2018 conference, Iasi, Romania, June 18-20, 2018.
Note: [†] The research presented here has been partially supported by the Data Science Research Center, University of Bucharest and by the ATLAS project (CCCDI - UEFISCDI, project no. PN-III-P1-1.2-PCCDI-2017-0272, in the PNCDI III framework).
Abstract: The relation between a structure and the function it runs is of interest in many fields, including computer science, biology (organ vs. function) and psychology (body vs. mind). Our paper addresses this question with reference to computer science recent hardware and software advances, particularly in areas as Robotics, Self-Adaptive Systems, IoT, CPS, AI-Hardware, etc. At the modelling, conceptual level our main contribution is the introduction of the concept of “virtual organism” (VO), to populate the intermediary level between reconfigurable hardware agents and intelligent, adaptive software agents. A virtual organism has a structure, resembling the hardware capabilities, and it runs low-level functions, implementing the software requirements. The model is compositional in space (allowing the virtual organisms to aggregate into larger organisms) and in time (allowing the virtual organisms to get composed functionalities). The virtual organisms studied here are in 2D (two dimensions) and their structures are described by 2D patterns (adding time, we get a 3D model). By reconfiguration an organism may change its structure to another structure in the same 2D pattern. We illustrate the VO concept with a few increasingly more complex VO’s dealing with flow management or a publisher-subscriber mechanism for handling services. We implemented a simulator for a VO, collecting flow over a tree-structure (TC-VO), and the quantitative results show reconfigurable structures are better suited than fixed structures in dynamically changing environments. Finally, we briefly show how Agapia - a structured parallel, interactive programming language where dataflow and control flow structures can be freely mixed - may be used for getting quick implementations for VO’s simulation.
