Macro-to-micro behavioural mappings in distributed systems: a characterisation on event structures
Abstract
Engineering the self-organising behaviour of artificial collective systems, such as robot swarms, is challenging. Effective abstractions, provided by programming paradigms tailored to the purpose, can simplify the task of designers by promoting conceptual and practical tools supporting reasoning and implementation. Macro-programming has emerged as an umbrella term for paradigms (like aggregate and choreographic programming) aimed at specifying collective behaviours by a global perspective, largely abstracting micro-level details. In this work, we characterise the macro-programming setting by leveraging the formal framework of event structures, which represents collective computations as causal graphs of interactions among computation events. Specifically, we identify different types of macro-to-micro mechanisms, namely ways of mapping macroscopic specifications into local policies, allowing to conceptualise notable paradigms like aggregate and choreographic programming as specific instances of macro-programming.
This paper has been accepted at the SASSO 2026 workshop, co-located with ACSOS 2026.
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Roberto Casadei
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering @ University of Bologna
My research is at the intersection of artificial collective intelligence and software engineering.