On the Representation of Spatially Moving Entities using Time-Variant Topologies

The representation of spatially moving systems is a complex task since communication is unstructured, making it difficult to assess what are the entities currently communicating. Given that interaction is mainly governed by the physical location of the entities, the communication pattern changes over time requiring a dynamic topology. To solve this problem we use the Heterogeneous Flow Systems Specification (HFSS), a modular modeling formalism designed to represent hybrid systems with time-variant topologies. We exploit the ability to represent dynamic topologies as an alternative to a representation using publish/subscribe (pub/sub) communication. We demonstrate that pub/sub can be modeled with a point-to-point communication framework with a dynamic topology. Additionally, we show that HFSS dynamic topologies can support a large variety of representations taking advantage of the specificities of the application domains, enabling more expressive and more efficient descriptions of moving entities.