Abstract
Progresses in ubiquitous, embedded, and social networking and computing make possible for people in urban areas to dynamically interact with each other and with ICT devices around. This can result in a system with a very large number of agents working together in an orchestrated and self-organizing way to achieve specific urban-level goals, i.e., as if they were a “superorganism”. In this paper, we sketch the future vision of urban superorganisms and overview some emerging application areas heading towards the vision. Following, we identify the key challenges in engineering self-organizing multi-agent systems that can work as a superorganism, i.e., seamlessly involving ICT agents and human agents so to achieve some required urban level goals. Finally, we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure to support our future vision of self-organizing urban superorganisms.
Highlights
Progresses in mobile and ubiquitous computing are paving the way for innovative services to perceive detailed information about the surrounding world and interact with it [14]
The ultimate vision is that of an heterogeneous urban-scale multiagent system [29], whose individual agents can self-organize their collective activities to achieve specific urban-level goals, as if they were part of a single organism, i.e., what in biology is usually called a “superorganism” [26]
In this article, starting from the assessed biological perspective on superorganisms, we sketch the future vision of urban superorganisms, showing how ICT capabilities and human capabilities well complement each other
Summary
Progresses in mobile and ubiquitous computing are paving the way for innovative services to perceive detailed information about the surrounding world and interact with it [14]. Social networks are promoting innovative models and tools to engage people in situated collaboration activities [50] In urban scenarios, these factors let us envision the possibility of integrating the complementary sensing, computing, and actuating capabilities of ICT agents and of humans agents, so as to realize a number of innovative services to increase both quality of life and urban sustainability [60]. The road towards the full realization of the urban superorganism vision and of its associated applications is plenty of challenging open research questions These range from scientific questions (e.g., how can we enforce “by design” a specific self-organizing behavior?) to engineering (what coordination models and technologies better suit a large system of heterogeneous agents?) and social ones (how can we made people willing to act as part of the superorganism?).
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