This document discusses urban superorganisms and the SAPERE project. It describes how future cities could become superorganisms through tight coupling of humans and ICT that enables collective participation and action. The SAPERE project aims to define and implement a framework for adaptive service ecosystems in cities using nature-inspired and spatially-situated approaches. It proposes basic eco-laws and self-organization patterns to program applications and steer behaviors in this environment. There are still open challenges around engineering and programming tools, patterns of self-organization, and balancing top-down and bottom-up approaches.

1. Engineering Franco Zambonelli
Socio-Technical Reggio Emilia
Università di Modena e
Urban Superorganisms franco.zambonelli@unimore.it

2. E Pluribus Unum

3. Superorganisms
• Colonies(of(ants,(termites,(
etc.(
• Organisms(composed(of(
many(individual(ones(
• That(exhibit(finalized(
collec>ve(par>cipa>ve(
behaviors((or(“collec>ve(
intelligence”)(

4. Urban
Superorganisms
• Can(our(urban(
environments(become(
superorganisms?(
• What(could(this(actually(
mean?(
• Why(socioEtechnical?(

5. Smart Cities: From Senseable…
• Sensing what’s
happening
– Via ICT devices Sense%
– And social
networks
• To better
understand (via
data analysis) Understand %
– City and social (compute)%
dynamics
– At a global level

6. …To Actuable
• We can “shape”
other than
understand Sense% Act
%
(Steer)
%
– Actuating ICT
devices
– Steering human
actions
• Closing the loop Understand %
that enables (compute)%
finalized urban
behaviors possible

7. …To Actuable
• We can “shape”
other than
understand Sense% Act
%
(Steer)
%
– Actuating ICT
device
– Steering human
actions
• Closing the loop Understand %
that enables (compute)%
finalized urban
behaviors possible

8. Urban Superorganisms: ICT Side
• An ICT-enriched urban environment with rich
sensing, actuating, and computing (SAC) capabilities
– Sensing: sensor networks, tags, smart objects,etc.
– Actuating: traffic controllers, public digital displays,
critical infrastructures
– Computing: highly distributed and decentralized, with
inter-connected computational engines everywhere

9. Urban Superorganisms: Human Side
• People with smart phones or alike (or whatever will
appear in the future as wearable devices) contribute
to such SAC capabilities
– Sensing: the 5 senses + smart phones
– Actuating: the body
– Computing: human & social intelligence

10. Urban Superorganisms:
Putting All Together
• The ICT and Human/Social level
blurred to the point of invisibility:
• Complementing each other in a
process of high value co-creation
• In the resulting overall “urban
organism”, we can achieve very
high-levels of collective
– Perception
– Awareness
– Action
• Dramatically changing the way we
move, live, work, and play, in our
towns

11. Living in a Superorganism
• Collective vs individual awareness
– Reflecting on ourselves as members of a community
• Be capable of understanding and acting together in real time
– Immediate feedback to/from the community

12. Collective Mobility, for Instance
• Mobility per se :: steer for car, bike, ride sharing
• Childcare :: steering & monitoting children on their way to
school
• Exhibitions :: steer to avoid crowd or suggest paths
• All of these requiring collective sensing awareness and action
• And can (should?) rely on bio-inspired solutions

13. The SAPERE Project
• SAPERE Self-aware Pervasive
Service Ecosystems
– EU FP7 FET
– Starting October 1st 2010, lasting
3 years
• Key Challenges
– To define and implement a
framework for adaptive service
ecosystems
– Models + Middleware
– Experience with pervasive urban
services and pervasive displays

14. The SAPERE Approach
• Nature-inspired (Biochemical)
– Simply metaphor for combining/aggregating services
in a spontaneous way
– Whether human or
ICT ones
• Spatially-situated
– To match the
nature of urban
scenarios
– Adaptive
– Spontaneous
reconfiguration of
activities and
interactions

15. The SAPERE Architecture
• Humans & ICT Devices
– Interact by injecting/
consuming service/data
components
• Service Components
– Execute in a sort virtual
Spatial substrate
– Moving, acting, composing,
as from eco-laws
• Eco Laws
– Rule local activities and
interactions
– Apply based on state of
local components
– Self-organization of
collective behavior

16. The SAPERE Eco-laws
• Identification of 4 primitive eco-laws
– Forming a necessary and complete set bond
– Upon which to build more complex
self-organization patterns
• The Eco-laws
– Bonding: sort of chemical bond, local
connection of LSAs – subsuming
discovery and invocation spread
– Spreading: diffusion of LSAs to
neighbors, to enable non-local
interactions
– Aggregation: sort of fusion, primitive aggr
data reduction based on ODI
functions
– Decay: evaporation and deletion of
information, to perform decentralized
garbage collection in a decentralized decay
way

17. The SAPERE Self-org Patterns
• Built upon the set of basic
eco-laws
– Which can be
considered sorts of
“primitive patterns”
• To define complex bio-
inspired self-organization
and self-composition
behaviours
– Counterproof of the
completeness and
efficacy of the basic
set

18. Steering Mobility in SAPERE

19. Programming SAPERE Apps
• Have SAPERE middleware launched
in the nodes to be involved
• Write agents that inject LSAs
– To express services/
functionalities they made
available
– To request (formal fields) the
services/data/funtionalities they
requires
• Exploit self-org patterns to realize
specific distributed functionaities
– Gradients, Chemiotaxis,
Context completion, etc.
• Let the SAPERE space react by
triggering eco-laws and react to
events (bond, spread, etc.)

20. Steering Behaviors in SAPERE
with an Ecosystem of Displays

21. Open Challenges
! There are many challenges to solve
! Engineering and programming tools
! Patterns of self-organization
! Top-down vs bottom-up approaches
! Incenvitives for participation
! Just to mention a few…

22. Challenge: Engineering Tools
! Designing
! How to represent collective urban situations?
! How to turn it into collective awareness?
! How to represent urban goals and plan of actions?
! Role of existing social networks in future ecosystems?
! Programming
! What programming languages and abstractions?
! How to trigger/deploy specific urban behaviors?
! How to measure the goodness/badness of behaviors?

23. Challenge: Patterns
! Given the basic sense-understand-act loop schemes
! At urban scale, multidutes of local/nested loops co-exists
! What are the architectural patterns by which such loops
can be organized?
! What is the impact of different patterns on urban
behaviors?
! Towhat extent we can “design” the shape of such
loops?
Breakpoint
Token
Next
element
to
execute

24. Challenge:Top-down/Bottom-up
! Bottom-upself-organization
and adaptation
! Driven by emergence (often
implicit, e.g., stigmergic)
feedback loop in interactions
! Very robust and efficient
! Cannot by designed by
definition
! Top-down self-adaptation
! Explicit engineering of
feedback loops
! Needed to enforce specific
behaviors?
! Howwe can make the two
co-exists?

25. Traffic Steering:
Top-down Control

26. Traffic Steering:
Bottom-up Control
By Prof. Peter Stone
@UTA.edu

27. Traffic Steering:
Mixing Top Down and Bottom up

28. The Roundabout Lesson:
Engineering the environment
• The(shape(of(the(environment(
can(affect(the(behavior(of(selfE
organizing(components(
– Without(undermining(their(
autonomy(
– Without(losing(the(advantages(of(
selfEorganiza>on(
– Yet(promo>ng(more(predictability(
• And(enabling(topEdown(
engineering(
– The(shape(you(give(is(the(
behavior(you(get(

29. Engineering the Environment
in SAPERE
• What does it means to “shape” the environment
– Shaping its perception by components
– Equivalent to the distort the way LSAs are perceived and propagate
• Very easy to
implement but…
– Still to be verified
its effectiveness
and the ease of
engineering top-
down behaviors in
this way

30. Engineering the Environment
in SAPERE
• What does it means to “shape” the environment
– Shaping its perception by components
– Equivalent to the distort the way LSAs are perceived and propagate
• Very easy to
implement but…
– Still to be verified
its effectiveness
and the ease of
engineering top-
down behaviors in
this way

31. Conclusions
• Our future cities will become sorts of superorganisms
• Human & ICT tightly coupled
• Collective participation and action
• Bio-inspired solutions at work in future cities
• How can we engineer these?
• SAPERE is doing some steps in the right direction
• Yet there are a lot of challenges to solve