C3L: an integrated computation, communication and control language for dynamically controlled heterogeneous devices

Innovations in computing and communications have enabled autonomous electromechanical devices that change their internal states in response to real time interactions with other devices, software agents, or smart sensors. A critical research challenge is to harness the electro-mechanical capabilities of these devices via ad-hoc wireless networks to actuate deliberate processes which adapt to the operational dynamics and perform collaborative missions cognitively. C3L is a language designed to capture the semantics of the dynamical architecture of such systems for conducting complex, time-critical operations. The alphabet at each level of C3L consists of atomic events and actions, controllable or uncontrollable. Using a common alphabet, independently developed heterogeneous devices can plug and play in ad hoc networked applications with individual or coordinated strategies. This language provides an integrated framework for computation, communications and situation-aware control for multi-level fusion of distributed information. It combines the reasoning properties of agent-oriented languages with discrete event control of physical devices so that operational dynamics of the system can be embedded in the higher level semantics of the language. It takes advantage of abstraction and reasoning to build multi-device systems with both situation and self awareness. The syntax and semantics of C3L are presented and discussed in detail. The power and flexibility of C3L in modeling distributed dynamic operations, as opposed to predefined protocols for agent interaction languages, is illustrated through Dynamic Space-time Clustering of spatial-temporal sensor information for tracking a mobile target in a sensor field.

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