Dr. Asuman Sunbul, Kestrel Institute - "Application Design for Real-Time, Embedded Sensor Networks"

When we look at the current technology, we will observe a strong divergence away from traditional computing. While the emphasis of traditional computing involves a certain kind of more or less ``fixed'' networks, its more future oriented counterpart is a collection of mostly mobile, tiny devices which may be equipped with sensors, actuators and radio. Typical examples are e.g. swarm type systems, ubiquitous computing, biologically inspired or network embedded systems.

The application design for those environments are considerably different than their traditional counterparts. There is no centralized processor to guide the global strategy towards good solutions. The system has to be capable of accomplishing difficult tasks in dynamic and varied environments without any external guidance or control and with no central coordination. Further, they vary in terms of network connectivity, available power, available sensors and reliability of sensor data

This talk will give an insight of ongoing work in the CONSONA project at Kestrel Institute. Distributed problem solving techniques will be presented that are based on a concept of refinement transformations from abstract constraint specifications to executable code.