Infrastructure for engineered emergence on sensor/actuator networks

The study of self-organizing systems has now reached the tool-building phase, in which a new discipline of self-managing systems engineering can begin to emerge. The next step is to refine the principles of self-organization into a system of composable parts suitable for engineering - much as components such as capacitors, transistors, and resistors capture electromagnetism principles for electronic engineering. We´ve begun the process of transforming the science into an engineering discipline in the domain of sensor/actuator network applications, observing that in many applications the deployed network approximates a physical space and that the space, rather than the network, is being programmed. This observation lets us use the amorphous medium abstraction to decouple self-management problems. So, global behavior descriptions in our Proto language can be compiled automatically into locally executed code that produces emergent phenomena matching the global description. We´ve experimentally verified our code both in simulation and (for small programs) on a network of sensor/actuator nodes called Mica2 motes.