Collaborative State Machines
Collaborative State Machines (CSM) is a programming model for building reactive, distributed applications 🌐 that run seamlessly across the cloud, edge, and IoT.
Modern applications are increasingly dynamic, stateful, and distributed across multiple environments, which traditional programming models often struggle to handle. CSM addresses this challenge by letting you design applications as collections of autonomous state machines that collaborate 🤝. Each machine can run in the cloud, at the edge, or directly on IoT devices, while the system continues to operate as a single cohesive application.
About us
CSM is a research project developed by the Distributed and Parallel Systems Group 🏛️ at the University of Innsbruck.
As a research initiative, CSM aims to create a disruptive, reactive programming model ⚡ for distributed applications that span the cloud, edge, and IoT. Our goal is to enable developers to build systems that are responsive, stateful, and scalable, while remaining simple to reason about and deploy in real-world environments.
The project explores how collections of collaborating state machines can provide a cohesive, event-driven view of a distributed application, supporting automatic scheduling, deployment, and optimization across heterogeneous computing layers.
By combining theory with practical experimentation, CSM seeks to bridge the gap between academic research 📚 and real-world distributed systems ⚙️, providing a model that is both rigorous and applicable.
State machines
At the heart of CSM are small, autonomous state machines 🔹 that form the building blocks of distributed applications. Each state machine maintains its own state, responds to events, and can trigger actions or external services. When combined, these machines create a cohesive, reactive system capable of operating across cloud, edge, and IoT environments without being tied to specific hardware or infrastructure.
State machines in CSM are designed to:
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React to events ⚡ from sensors, other machines, or the surrounding environment, enabling timely and context-aware responses.
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Maintain their own state 🗂️ while optionally interacting with persistent or shared data, providing consistency and traceability.
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Trigger actions or services 🛠️ directly within states and transitions, allowing state-driven execution of business logic or external operations.
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Collaborate seamlessly 🤝 by exchanging events and data with other machines, supporting coordinated behavior across distributed components.
This approach makes it easier to reason about complex, distributed, event-driven logic, ensuring that applications remain predictable, maintainable, and scalable while leveraging the full power of reactive programming.
Learn
Learn more about the fundamental programming model in the CSM Specifications.
Features
CSM provides a set of core capabilities that make building distributed, event-driven applications more structured and manageable:
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Resilience 🌱 — applications adapt dynamically to changing conditions and can recover gracefully from partial failures, ensuring robust operation across heterogeneous environments.
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Modularity 🧩 — each state machine encapsulates a distinct piece of behavior, simplifying understanding, maintenance, and extension of the overall system.
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True distribution 🌍 — state machines can run seamlessly across cloud, edge, and IoT devices without requiring manual handling of communication, coordination, or deployment details.
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Separation of concerns ⚖️ — application logic is expressed independently of infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on what the system should do rather than how it is deployed or executed.
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Structured data management 📦 — local, transient, and persistent data are handled with well-defined scopes and lifecycles, supporting consistency and observability throughout the application.
This combination of features ensures that applications built with CSM are scalable, maintainable, and predictable, while taking full advantage of distributed execution environments.
Learn
Get started quickly by following our getting started guide.
Use cases
CSM is particularly well-suited for systems that are distributed, event-driven, and stateful. Its reactive and modular approach enables developers to design applications that respond efficiently to changes in their environment while maintaining consistent state across heterogeneous components. Common use cases include:
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IoT & Edge Solutions 📡 — devices react to local events with minimal latency while coordinating and syncing with cloud services for analytics, logging, or further processing.
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Surveillance & Monitoring 🎥 — distributed data streams are collected, processed, and acted upon in real time, supporting automated alerts and operational insights.
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Smart Factories 🏭 — workflows orchestrate machines, sensors, and analytics pipelines to optimize production, reduce downtime, and maintain safety.
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Large-Scale Cloud Systems ☁️ — scalable applications with a clear separation of business logic and infrastructure, supporting multiple distributed components without sacrificing maintainability or observability.
This flexibility makes CSM a versatile programming model for any scenario requiring reliable, reactive, and coordinated distributed behavior.