A large class of distributed computations in many application domains requires dynamic and adaptive coordination among geographically distributed and autonomous participants.
While the foundations of distributed computing have been considerably developed, the question of the value of resources such as partial knowledge, initialization or partial coordination remains unresolved. In many current distributed systems, participants, such as clients, devices, or sensors at any level of granularity, are integrated into a changing network topology to accomplish a global objective despite the fact that the knowledge available at each participant is local, incomplete, imperfect and asymmetric. State-based computation?such as that employed in self-stabilizing protocols?is an exciting computing paradigm that provides an umbrella covering such local computability towards global objectives.
