Nature-Inspired Spatial Metaphors for Pervasive Service Ecosystems

Innovative paradigms and frameworks have to be identified to enable the effective deployment and execution of pervasive computing services able to enforcing properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, self-management, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural systems, by enabling modeling and deployment of services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in a system of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of spatial ldquolaws of naturerdquo. In this context, this paper presents a reference architecture to uniformly frame such concepts, surveys and critically analyzes different nature-inspired spatial metaphors to realize the idea, and details our current research agenda concerning the development of service frameworks inspired to the ecological metaphor.