Abstract

As computers become smaller in size and advances in communications technology are made, we hypothesise that a new range of applications involving computing in road vehicles will emerge. These applications may be enabled by the future arrival of general-purpose computing platforms in vehicles. Many of these applications will involve the collection, processing and distribution of data sampled by sensors on large numbers of vehicles. This talk is primarily concerned with addressing how these applications can be designed and implemented by programmers.

A problem with traditional approaches to programming this kind of application is that the number of vehicles and the nature of computational infrastructure available are not known until the application is executed.

Instead, we propose that the functionality of applications is designed and implemented in a more abstract fashion, and it is left to a compiler to decide where each component of the application is best executed.