Experimental Analysis of Programmable Particles

Autonomous mobile computational entities have been extensively studied in distributed computing. Particularly, studies in Programmable Particles ‒ simple and homogeneous computational elements ‒ have recently increased as they could be used in many situations [11] (e.g., minimally invasive surgeries, autonomous monitoring and repair systems). These particles are able to establish and release bonds, and can move in a self-organizing way to solve a particular problem by means of local interactions.Several simulators have been implemented to work with distributed algorithms in different types of networks (e.g., JBotSim [3], VisibleSim [10]) but none of them has been designed especially for Programmable Particles and has been made public.In this thesis, I will present and experiment with a new multiplatform simulator for Programmable Particles, where the user is able to customize the number of particles in the system, the environment and the algorithms executed by each of them easily.