A Programming Model for Hybrid Collaborative Adaptive Systems

Hybrid Diversity-aware Collective Adaptive Systems (HDA-CAS) are a new generation of socio-technical systems where both human and machine peers collectively participate in complex cognitive and physical tasks. These systems are characterized by the fundamental properties of hybridity and collectiveness, hiding from users the complexities associated with managing the collaboration and coordination of human-machine teams. The SmartSociety platform is a set of integrated software components that jointly provide a number of advanced HDA-CAS functionalities. As part of the CAS initiative, we have developed a programming model and Java APIs that make the use of those functionalities easy and accessible to application developers. In this paper we present the SmartSociety programming model elements, including the principal contributions – Collectives and Collective-based Tasks. We describe and discuss their functionality, implementation and runtime environment. Finally, we qualitatively evaluate the programming model and the language constructs with respect to the desired HDA-CAS properties.