Decomposition of fundamental problems for cooperative autonomous mobile systems

Mobile computing can be seen as a natural extension of distributed computing, with the difference that hosts can be physically mobile. This results in many interesting new challenges. The most original aspect of mobile computing with respect to traditional distributed computing is when one considers problems whereby the movements of the host must be controlled. In particular, this is a central issue for cooperating autonomous mobile systems. We outline a specification framework to define recurrent problems for cooperative autonomous mobile systems. The framework consists of four generic properties (two liveness and two safety properties) that can be combined to define many different problems, including those surveyed in the literature. We regard this as a necessary step toward a better understanding of the relationships between problems.