Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling
This work aims to unify research for developers in spatial computing, collective adaptive systems, and IoT, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing concepts without new methods or data.
The paper addresses the fragmented state of macroprogramming, which models system-level behavior by abstracting low-level details, by providing an integrated view of the field along with opportunities and challenges.
Macroprogramming refers to the theory and practice of conveniently expressing the macro(scopic) behaviour of a system using a single program. Macroprogramming approaches are motivated by the need of effectively capturing global/system-level aspects and the collective behaviour of a set of interacting components, while abstracting over low-level details. In the past, this style of programming has been primarily adopted to describe the data-processing logic in wireless sensor networks; recently, research forums on spatial computing, collective adaptive systems, and Internet-of-Things have provided renewed interest in macro-approaches. However, related contributions are still fragmented and lacking conceptual consistency. Therefore, to foster principled research, an integrated view of the field is provided, together with opportunities and challenges.