Practical Aggregate Programming with Protelis

Collective adaptive systems are an emerging class of networked and situated computational systems with a wide range of applications, such as in the Internet of Things, wireless sensor networks, and smart cities. Engineering such systems poses a number of challenges, and in particular many approaches, based upon designing the machine-to-machine interaction directly, suffer from a local-to-global abstraction problem. In this tutorial, we introduce the aggregate computing approach, rooted in the field calculus and practically available through the Protelis programming language, as a means to build collective, situated adaptive systems. The approach focuses on programming the overall aggregate behaviour, making use of a "resilience API," while leaving to these libraries and the language machinery the responsibility of mapping this to the behavior of individual devices.