engineering self-organizing urban superorganisms
TRANSCRIPT
Engineering Socio-Technical
Urban Superorganisms
Franco Zambonelli Università di Modena e
Reggio Emilia
E Pluribus Unum
Superorganisms
• Colonies(of(ants,(termites,(etc.(
• Organisms(composed(of(many(individual(ones(
• That(exhibit(finalized(collec>ve(par>cipa>ve(behaviors((or(“collec>ve(intelligence”)(
Urban Superorganisms
• Can(our(urban(environments(become(superorganisms?(
• What(could(this(actually(mean?(
• Why(socioEtechnical?(
Smart Cities: From Senseable…
• Sensing what’s happening – Via ICT devices – And social
networks
• To better understand (via data analysis) – City and social
dynamics – At a global level
Sense%
Understand%(compute)%
…To Actuable
• We can “shape” other than understand – Actuating ICT
devices – Steering human
actions
• Closing the loop that enables finalized urban behaviors possible
Sense%
Understand%(compute)%
Act%(Steer)%
…To Actuable
• We can “shape” other than understand – Actuating ICT
device – Steering human
actions
• Closing the loop that enables finalized urban behaviors possible
Sense%
Understand%(compute)%
Act%(Steer)%
Urban Superorganisms: ICT Side • An ICT-enriched urban environment with rich
sensing, actuating, and computing (SAC) capabilities – Sensing: sensor networks, tags, smart objects,etc. – Actuating: traffic controllers, public digital displays,
critical infrastructures – Computing: highly distributed and decentralized, with
inter-connected computational engines everywhere
Urban Superorganisms: Human Side • People with smart phones or alike (or whatever will
appear in the future as wearable devices) contribute to such SAC capabilities – Sensing: the 5 senses + smart phones – Actuating: the body – Computing: human & social intelligence
Urban Superorganisms: Putting All Together
• The ICT and Human/Social level blurred to the point of invisibility:
• Complementing each other in a process of high value co-creation
• In the resulting overall “urban organism”, we can achieve very high-levels of collective – Perception – Awareness – Action
• Dramatically changing the way we move, live, work, and play, in our towns
Living in a Superorganism • Collective vs individual awareness
– Reflecting on ourselves as members of a community
• Be capable of understanding and acting together in real time – Immediate feedback to/from the community
Collective Mobility, for Instance • Mobility per se :: steer for car, bike, ride sharing • Childcare :: steering & monitoting children on their way to
school • Exhibitions :: steer to avoid crowd or suggest paths • All of these requiring collective sensing awareness and action • And can (should?) rely on bio-inspired solutions
The SAPERE Project • SAPERE �Self-aware Pervasive
Service Ecosystems� – EU FP7 FET – Starting October 1st 2010, lasting
3 years
• Key Challenges – To define and implement a
framework for adaptive service ecosystems
– Models + Middleware – Experience with pervasive urban
services and pervasive displays
The SAPERE Approach • Nature-inspired (Biochemical)
– Simply metaphor for combining/aggregating services in a spontaneous way
– Whether human or ICT ones
• Spatially-situated – To match the
nature of urban scenarios
– Adaptive – Spontaneous
reconfiguration of activities and interactions
The SAPERE Architecture • Humans & ICT Devices
– Interact by injecting/consuming service/data components
• Service Components – Execute in a sort virtual �Spatial substrate�
– Moving, acting, composing, as from eco-laws
• Eco Laws – Rule local activities and
interactions – Apply based on state of
local components – Self-organization of
collective behavior
The SAPERE Eco-laws • Identification of 4 primitive eco-laws
– Forming a necessary and complete set – Upon which to build more complex
self-organization patterns • The Eco-laws
– Bonding: sort of chemical bond, local connection of LSAs – subsuming discovery and invocation
– Spreading: diffusion of LSAs to neighbors, to enable non-local interactions
– Aggregation: sort of fusion, primitive data reduction based on ODI functions
– Decay: evaporation and deletion of information, to perform decentralized garbage collection in a decentralized way
bond
spread
aggr
decay
The SAPERE Self-org Patterns • Built upon the set of basic
eco-laws – Which can be
considered sorts of “primitive patterns”
• To define complex bio-inspired self-organization and self-composition behaviours – Counterproof of the
completeness and efficacy of the basic set
Steering Mobility in SAPERE
Programming SAPERE Apps • Have SAPERE middleware launched
in the nodes to be involved • Write agents that inject LSAs
– To express services/functionalities they made available
– To request (formal fields) the services/data/funtionalities they requires
• Exploit self-org patterns to realize specific distributed functionaities – Gradients, Chemiotaxis,
Context completion, etc. • Let the SAPERE space react by
triggering eco-laws and react to events (bond, spread, etc.)
Steering Behaviors in SAPERE with an Ecosystem of Displays
Open Challenges ! There are many challenges to solve
! Engineering and programming tools ! Patterns of self-organization ! Top-down vs bottom-up approaches ! Incenvitives for participation
! Just to mention a few…
Challenge: Engineering Tools ! Designing
! How to represent collective urban situations? ! How to turn it into collective awareness? ! How to represent urban goals and plan of actions? ! Role of existing social networks in future ecosystems?
! Programming ! What programming languages and abstractions? ! How to trigger/deploy specific urban behaviors? ! How to measure the goodness/badness of behaviors?
Challenge: Patterns ! Given the basic sense-understand-act loop schemes
! At urban scale, multidutes of local/nested loops co-exists ! What are the architectural patterns by which such loops
can be organized? ! What is the impact of different patterns on urban
behaviors? ! To what extent we can “design” the shape of such
loops?
Feedback loop 1 (in brown) Feedback loop 2 (in green)
Token
Next element to execute
Breakpoint
Challenge: Top-down/Bottom-up ! Bottom-up self-organization
and adaptation ! Driven by emergence (often
implicit, e.g., stigmergic) feedback loop in interactions
! Very robust and efficient ! Cannot by designed by
definition ! Top-down self-adaptation
! Explicit engineering of feedback loops
! Needed to enforce specific behaviors?
! How we can make the two co-exists?
Traffic Steering: Top-down Control
Traffic Steering: Bottom-up Control
By Prof. Peter Stone @UTA.edu
Traffic Steering: Mixing Top Down and Bottom up
The Roundabout Lesson: Engineering the environment • The(shape(of(the(environment(can(affect(the(behavior(of(selfEorganizing(components(– Without(undermining(their(autonomy(
– Without(losing(the(advantages(of(selfEorganiza>on(
– Yet(promo>ng(more(predictability(
• And(enabling(topEdown(engineering(– The(shape(you(give(is(the(behavior(you(get(
Engineering the Environment in SAPERE
• What does it means to “shape” the environment – Shaping its perception by components – Equivalent to the distort the way LSAs are perceived and propagate
• Very easy to implement but… – Still to be verified
its effectiveness and the ease of engineering top-down behaviors in this way
Engineering the Environment in SAPERE
• What does it means to “shape” the environment – Shaping its perception by components – Equivalent to the distort the way LSAs are perceived and propagate
• Very easy to implement but… – Still to be verified
its effectiveness and the ease of engineering top-down behaviors in this way
Conclusions • Our future cities will become sorts of superorganisms
• Human & ICT tightly coupled • Collective participation and action • Bio-inspired solutions at work in future cities
• How can we engineer these? • SAPERE is doing some steps in the right direction • Yet there are a lot of challenges to solve