Towards nature-inspired pervasive service ecosystems: Concepts and simulation experiences

Pervasive and mobile computing devices increasingly populate our environments. In this context, innovative frameworks have to be identified for the deployment and execution of pervasive service systems made up of a massive number of components, and able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks could get inspiration from natural systems, by modeling and deploying services as autonomous agents, spatially situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of “laws of nature”. A conceptual architecture is introduced to frame the key concepts of nature-inspired approaches and to survey the key natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize the concept of pervasive service ecosystems. Following, the key characteristics of our original ecological approach are detailed, also with the help of representative case studies, and an extensive set of simulation experiments are reported to show the potential effectiveness of the approach.