Tardis Project

Developing and managing distributed systems is a complex task requiring expertise across multiple domains. This complexity considerably increases in swarm systems, which are highly dynamic and heterogeneous and require decentralised solutions that adapt to highly dynamic system conditions. The project TaRDIS focuses on supporting the correct and efficient development of applications for swarms and decentralised distributed systems, by combining a novel programming paradigm with a toolbox for supporting the development and executing of applications. TaRDIS proposes a language-independent event-driven programming paradigm that exposes, through an event-based interface, distribution abstractions and powerful decentralised machine learning primitives. The programming environment will assist in building correct systems by taking advantage of behavioural types to automatically analyse the component's interactions to ensure correctness-by-design of their applications, taking into account application invariants and the properties of the target execution environment. TaRDIS underlying distributed middleware will provide essential services, including data management and decentralised machine learning components. The middleware will hide the heterogeneity and address the dynamicity of the distributed execution environment by orchestrating and adapting the execution of different application components across devices in an autonomic and intelligent way. TaRDIS results will be integrated in a development environment, and also as standalone tools, both of which can be used for developing applications for swarm systems. The project results will be validated in the context of four different use cases provided by high impact industrial partners that range from swarms of satellites, decentralised dynamic marketplaces, decentralised machine learning solutions for personal-assistant applications, and the distributed control process of a smart factory.