Design Patterns for engineering SOS

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Design Patterns for SOS?

  • The idea of reuse existing, proven solutions seems to be interesting, but...
  • Focus on mechanisms that cause systems to be SOS
  • Use a pattern at design time, so that a SOS runtime behaviour shows up
  • The usage of design patterns depends on the nature of the desired system
    • Categorize types of SOS and assign possible design patterns, which are useful for which type
  • Checklist seems currently to be more appropriate, we know what is necessary to get SOS
    • Checklist for basic properties of SOS: Adaptivity, Emergence, Autonomy, Decentralisation, Cognition, Feedback, Multiple intercations
  • Runtime effects to show up: spatial temporal structures, multiple stability, parameter bifurcation

Design Patterns

  • Achitectural patterns
    • Observer-Controller Architecture (Organic Computing)
    • MAPE (Monitor, Analyze, Process, Execute) Cycle (IBM Autonomic Computing)
  • Patterns for (interaction) mechanisms
    • Artificial Hormone System (moving/placing resources/load balancing)
    • Ant foraging (reliably find shortest routes)
    • Pulse-coupled oscillators
    • Plain diffusion, replication, chemotaxis, and stigmergy, …
  • Patterns of coordination
    • Stigmergy
      • Using a shared medium/memory for aggregation
      • Decoupled coordination and communication style
      • Links exist to distributed system's work on "Virtual Shared Memory", Tuple Spaces, Blackboard approaches
      • Examples: Ant systems, Wikipedia, etc.
    • "Local Gradient"
      • Agents perceive relation to other agents, aggregate relations, communicate their information, and adapt their actions
      • Highly dynamic (dependent on agent availability, location, time), real-time
      • Examples: Swarms and packs (coordinated flight of bird swarms, hunting behaviour of packs, etc.)
    • Combine positive/negative feedback w. balance, evolution
      • Including approaches for stopping / re-starting evolution process
  • Control Theory -> Feedback loop
  • Coupling between local interactions and global behaviour


Related Work on Design Patterns

In software engineering: a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations [1]

  • Design Patterns for Self-organising Systems, Gardelli et al.
  • Design Patterns from Biology for Distributed Computing, Babaoglu et al.
  • Design patterns for decentralised coordination in self-organising, De Wolf et al.