… key point of keeping the DCP substrate as minimal as possible is necessary to provide primitives and basic interaction rules (self-organization, clustering, gossiping etc.) that enable the efficient execution and coordination of needed functionalities. Now, let us survey what are the key issues related to the realization of the DCP idea, and what could be useful sources of scientific and technological inspiration. The DCP should be developed (Fig. 2) to run not only over network nodes (cross-connect, routers, switches, home- gateways etc.), servers (storage, computing) and laptops, but also on users’ wireless handheld devices and small computing resources (e.g. mobile phones, PDAs, pervasive sensors etc.). Accordingly, the DCP should be implemented by means of some minimal middleware substrate, i.e. a software infrastructure deployed on top of the physical resources. Such a middleware substrate should provide for supporting the execution of individual DCP components, and should enforce the concepts of logical and physical distance, locality, local interactions and mobility, coherently to a specific structure of the space. Interaction rules of components should be dynamically plugged in the DCP depending on the application scenario. The advantage of this kind of rule-based approach is that these rules will be applied to all the services in a transparent way, guaranteeing a good separation of concerns in the development. One important aspect of the DCP implementation will be the absence of a common unifying component model (this goes also in the direction of middleware deconstruction) [12]. DCP design should not necessarily include the definition of how a component is made internally. Each developer should be able to create components without any constraints and possibly using third-party component frameworks (J2EE, agent-based frameworks etc.). This is the choice adopted by modern Web APIs, only defining XML-based protocols for method invocations and leaving open the possibility of implementing whatever kind of application and services using the API. A.L. Barabási pointed out that the dynamics of many social, technological and economic phenomena are driven by human actions, turning the quantitative understanding of human behaviour into a central question of modern science. Studies and simulations on small-world networks (Fig. 3a) represent an interesting effort to model the dynamical behaviour of social, economic and physical networks, and to properly explain why information in social networks tends to diffuse in a very fast and effective way. Accordingly, in order to allow effective and efficient interactions among DCP components enabling fast diffusion of information, it is reasonable to think that DCP components interact over a small-world network. The way in which components on the DPC live and interact (which may include how they capture and diffuse information, how they move in the environment, how they self-compose and/or self-aggregate with each others) is determined by the set of fundamental ’interaction rules’ regulating the DCP model. From this viewpoint, it is interesting to leverage laws of biological systems where evolvability and a close pattern–function relationship provide biological organisms with the plasticity to cope with systemic changes and environmental changes and to learn critical survival strategies under such circumstances by renormalization or multi-scale techniques [13]. Principles like reaction-diffusion could be adopted also in pervasive networks for building cognitive control …