Ambient Computing
From Self-Organizing Systems Group
The AmbiComp project is concerned with the software development process for a network of smart products. Together, such smart products form a potentially large distributed system that consists of small embedded controllers. AmbiComp aims at providing an easy means for software engineers to develop and deploy Ambient Intelligence software in such networks.
To this end, the AmbiComp partners have developed the concept of a so-called Ambient Intelligence Control Unit (AICU) , which can serve as basic building block for smart products. AICUs consist of one or more so-called sandwich modules (SMs). They equip an AICU with compute power, communication interfaces, and input/output lines for analog and digital signals. At least one of the SMs in an AICU runs a virtual machine executing transcoded bytecodes. These AmbiComp Virtual Machines (ACVMs) are able to create a single system image (SSI) across several physically separated AICUs. The SSI hides the distributed and potentially heterogeneous nature of such a network. It enables a programmer to write applications for the network as if it was a single system.
The SSI shifts the communication from explicit (i.e. provided by the programmer) to implicit (i.e. provided as a feature of the execution environment). This allows the system that creates the SSI to adapt to changes in the network without the necessity for changes in the application code. In the AmbiComp application scenario multiple ACVMs collaborate to provide such a SSI.
