FIS3 Project FoMaSE (Foundations for Macroprogramming-based Software Engineering)
- Project title: FoMaSE (Foundations for Macroprogramming-based Software Engineering)
- Principal Investigator (PI): Roberto Casadei, PhD
- Host Institution (HI): Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna
- Total funding amount: 1.1 million €
- Duration: 5 years
- Start date: TBD (no later than May 2026)
- Project website: https://fis3-fomase.github.io
- Abstract: 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)? On this, previous research on multi-agent (MAS) and collective adaptive systems (CAS) showed that domain-specific paradigms and “macro-level” abstractions (e.g., organisational, choreographical, and aggregate programming) can support analysis and development of software driving, e.g., robot swarms and Internet of Things systems. 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. Concurrently, artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods like multi-agent reinforcement and evolutionary learning, often used for automatic design of swarm controllers, tend to suffer from issues like those on scalability, interpretability, and reward/fitness design. FoMaSE aims to fill these crucial gaps, by linking recent insights from physics on the discovery of emergent phenomena to the realm of programming languages and SE, and exploiting coarse-grained “macro-programs” to mitigate issues in AI-based design. Specifically, FoMaSE aims to provide: (i) novel formalisations of collective computation and macro-programming; (ii) innovative scalable methods for testing and analysis of software systems exhibiting emergent multi-scale dynamics; (iii) integrative macro-programming languages and hybrid AI-based methods supporting understanding, development, interpretability, and validation of the target micro-macro link. 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.