Maintaining Spatial Relationships in Uncertain Environments

Abstract

Inter-related computations must sometimes maintain spatial relationships as they attempt to individually respond to changes in the environment. These changes may be related to application requirements (as in a sensor network) or resource requirements. Notably, maintenance of any spatial relationship is typically hard coded into application software using mechanism which roughly fit the mobile agent framework. Here we propose an alternative which allows application programmers to declaratively specify spatial relationships between related computations, which are then maintained by the run-time system. This paper argues for and presents key mechanisms involved in maintaining an important class of spatial relationships between computations.