Project Details

Here we provide some detailed information about the project FoMaSE (Foundations of Macroprogramming-based Software Engineering).

Table of Contents

TLDR

GOAL: The Foundations for Macro-programming-based Software Engineering (FoMaSE) basic research project aims to address the long-standing micro-macro link problem by the computer science and software engineering (SE) viewpoints: how to effectively engineer the software driving the micro-level computational parts of a system so that these collectively produce the designer’s intended macro-level behaviour (and how that intention could be specified)?

GAP: What is missing is a general theoretical and methodological framework for “macro-programming”, able to connect source code and computations to fundamental scientific principles on emergence, coarse-graining, and multi-scale dynamics, and to support systematic design of the micro-macro link.

EXPECTED OUTPUTS: Conceptual and methodological tools emerging from FoMaSE are expected to open new research directions on “software engineering for multi-scale dynamics and artificial collective intelligence”, fostering a virtuous cross-disciplinary synergy among SE, computer, and complex systems science.

History and background

Term macro-programming was introduced in early 2000s in the context of programming paradigms for wireless sensor networks (WSN).

In basically all the research papers, term macro-programming was always introduced informally and in limited extent.

By a terminological perspective, macro-programming appears to recall “macros” (the technique for symbolic substitution in programs); however, it actually refers to “macroscopic”.

The notion was never addressed directly and in explicitly terms, until two surveys that emerged in 2021/2022, one of which from the FoMaSE principal investigator:

Macroprogramming: Concepts, State of the Art, and Opportunities of Macroscopic Behaviour Modelling (Roberto Casadei, 2023, ACMSUR) (see also the longer arXiv version in 2022)
Macroprogramming in the internet of things: A systematic mapping study (Santana et al., 2021, SBCUP)

Conceptually, macro-programming is related to (at least) three broad areas:

multi-agent systems (MAS), including normative MAS, organisational paradigms, holonic MAS, etc.
distributed systems, including service computing (e.g., choreographies), WSNs, etc.
collective adaptive systems (CAS), including self-organisation/swarm programming, aggregate computing (cf. spatial computing, amorphous computing)

The micro-macro link is a long-standing issue in MAS research, as well as in “complexity science” threads (e.g., study of emergent phenomena).

However, the idea of macro-programming is more specific than what you normally find in those areas. In some way, the idea is of programming the overall collective behaviour of a computational system (possibly distributed) using denotations of macroscopic entities or outcomes. So, conceptually, the entire distributed computational ensemble is the “single machine” that you program against.

Macro-programming appears to entail a macro-to-micro directionality: the program talks about macroscopic aspects, and micro-level behaviour is induced in turn.

What are the benefits of macro-programming? Intuitively, you get a simplified, coarse-grained description of a collective behaviour. Of course, when talking about Turing-equivalent programming paradigms, it is a matter of practical expressiveness and the benefits related to program understanding, maintainability, and so on.