Application Ideas for Self-organizing Systems

Autonomous Transportation Systems

• Pipe systems for transportation of goods
• Autonomous Robots transport goods from A to B
• Goal:
  • Agents have to find their way to these pipe systems themselves
  • Agents have to move inside the pipe system from A to B
  • Problem: if many agents in the system how to organise them to avoid jams, …

Air Traffic Control System

• From top-down system to bottom-up system
• Decentralised
• Constraints, zero-tolerance against error
• Optimise the route
• Agent in the plane knows about other neighbouring planes and applies repulsion
  • Identifies the route (on the air)
  • Avoid other planes (on the air) – take regulations into account
  • Improve quality of service (time departure, ask for priority to leave the airport)
• Reasons
  • Many points of failures
  • Humans involved – air traffic controller

Self-Organising financial market

• Put software agents into stock markets
• Goal:
  • To make market more stable
  • Avoid crashes
  • To be more in line with economic theory (rational behaviour, faster, act in zero time)
• How (Alternatives)
  • All the trading is done by agents
  • Trade based on trust
  • Build a network of trust, help identify grey-zone
  • Population of agents that crawls the market and looks at it in other ways and identifies whether or not product/entity is trustful
    • Agents rely on human-like trust (identify healthy from unhealthy products)
    • Agents rely in facts on not on emotion or imitation
    • Agents identify risks
• Open questions
  • How to mix them with human people
• Acceptance?

Mass Panic and Mass Movement

• Use embedded or integrated sensors to sense mass movement
• Use mobile self-organizing nodes (e.g., drones) to get more information in areas of interest
• Reroute persons optimizing time to exit, time to find a free space in a train, etc.

Theft Prevention

• Using cooperating smart homes equipped with cameras, facilities to autonomously switch on light/TV
• Apply pattern recognition to identify theft attempts (e.g., persons spying around)
• Self-organization mechanisms are required to adapt to changing patterns and situations

Hybrid Human-Swarm scenarios

• A human leader ( in a rescue or exploration situation, or in a elderly people home) is followed and assisted by a swarm of SO elements.
• SO elements adjust to environment, can identify the current aim or goal of leader and help achieving it.
• e.g.: build step to elevate leader, help when shopping, overcome obstacles,