With respect to global computing, we will partecipate, in the context of the IST-FET SENSORIA project, in the development of a novel approach to the engineering of software systems for global computing. The goal is to support business process modelling over Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) in a way that is independent of the particular global computers on which services run and is more abstract than the current technologies for Web services, as currently developed e.g. by W3C and DAML.
We plan to use the ASM approach to study the role different computation models have for software architectures (sequential versus distributed computation, forms of interaction, in particular different communication models). We are also interested in those architectures aimed at controlling robots, being able to ensure behaviors of this class of autonomous systems. We also want to understand better the trade-off between the uniformity and thus generality of the resulting approach on the one side, and on the other side the advantages gained by tailoring the development technique to specific domains, capturing the peculiarities of the different applications domains.